Japanese Literature: Five Women Who Loved Love, The Glass Slipper and Other Stories and Masks (Coursework Sample)

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Japanese Literature: Five Women Who Loved Love, The Glass Slipper and Other Stories
and Masks
Ihara Saikaku depicts realistic scenes of bourgeois life blending it with complexity of human love where, at the end, love always culminates into tragic catharsis. Common traits of his writing include — use of foreshadowing, plotting the suspense of a situation itself, shaping characters in the context of affairs that are socially transgressive and making those characters ‘human’ by placing them in a dichotomy between ninjo (human emotion) and giri (duty) CITATION Jan00 \p 183 \l 1033 (Jansen 183), as they also perceived their society with contemporary values. However, his real charm lies in the subtleness of his depictions of diverged forms of carnal affection while retaining the lyrical note. The paragraph of our concern appears in the segment named as “The Sleeper Who Slipped Up”. As the title suggests, readers, from the very first glance, are aware of a sense of ‘mistake’ — the notion that echoes in the entire plot of the story. We almost ‘see’ the actions of Moemon, experience the revelation of mistake through film-like visual descriptions. The imagery offers us a sense of awkwardness, a hint of carnal affair and a disclosure of social transgression — themes which are fundamentally connected with the plot of the entire narrative. The third-person narrative style weaves a tension between realism and morality. Hence, the concerned paragraph represents the essence of the entire text by fitting perfectly into his poetic metis.
The narrative momentum of The Glass Slipper and Other Stories, authored by daisan no shinjin CITATION The \p 185 \l 1033 (Orbaugh 185) Shotaro Yasuoka, is the product of post-World-War-II Japan where the emptied Tokyo cityscape offers the sight of national trauma. Yasuoka's misfit protagonists often wriggle in hapless frustration, fastened in concatenation of family-bonds, like the son who was tired of accepting his strange father, an ex-army man now an indifferent kind of person living in the post-war Japan, in "The Sword Dance". This text follows the shishosetsu CITATION The \p 32 \l 1033 (Orbaugh 32) literary form where the author and the first-person narrator, usually the central character, are identical. Here we find a man who has failed to combat his ‘utterly incomprehensible emotion’ CITATION Yas08 \p 119 \l 1033 (Yasuoka 119). His reminiscence entails a sense of disempowerment, degradation and memories of humiliation. The ‘I-novels’ of Yasuoka can be read as a post-war monogatari — where father-figures have lost masculine authority, where life is under foreign occupation. Yasuoka’s protagonist is tormented in agonized reality and falls with the new structures and roles within the postwar family. He is searching the meaning of family in his memory. It is not merely a coincidence that he is listening to “The gloomy German song from the radio” CITATION Yas08 \p 119 \l 1033 (Yasuoka 119); it is a political statement made by the author to voice the problem of modern subjectivity in an unstable neo-natal post-war values.
In the Onnamen or Masks, Enchi Fumiko represents the tripartite structure of the narrative bringing three classical female-Noh-masks. This single symbolic element conjoins all the complex narrative threads and acts as a sophisticated meta-commentary — embellishing the dichotomy between character and role-play. There are repeated instances in the text where the author finds resemblance between the characteristic feature of Mieko and that of the Noh-mask, such as: ‘She's like the face on a No mask, wrapped in her own secrets’ CITATION Fum83 \p 31 \l 1033 (Fumiko 31); or ‘He [Ibuki] had oddly no clear mental image of her face... It was a face like a No mask, while the impression it gave was one of even greater obscurity and elusiveness’ CITATION Fum83 \p 91 \l 1033 (Fumiko 91). Seeing the display of masks-collection at the house of a Noh master, Yasuko tells Ibuki: ‘I couldn't help thinking that the one person meant to see those masks must be my own mother-in-law’, because ‘she must be one of the last women who lives ..... like the masks ….. with her deepest energies turned inward’ CITATION Fum83 \p 26 \l 1033 (Fumiko 26).
Mieko and Yasuko’s complex relationship finds refuge in their urg...