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The god that failed : the literary trajectory of Shimao Toshio

University of British Columbia

The topic of this thesis is the literary career of Shimao Toshio, as far as possible considered as a whole. It is my contention that previous scholarship has merely focused on the details of his sometimes riotously surrealistic storytelling, and has almost entirely neglected to ask what was the course of his overall development and the forces which drove his evolution as a writer. The first chapter covers Shimao's early work, life, and wartime experiences. Drawing on his pre-war writings, which have been almost entirely neglected by previous scholars, I demonstrate that the sense of alienation engendered by his unusual life experiences and upbringing already flourished before he entered the military as a suicide pilot. His military career on the one hand reinforced earlier trends, in that he was never sent on an attack and was thus once again rejected by death, and on the other put him in a unnatural and displaced position, as he unwittingly became almost a deity to the simple islanders among which he was stationed. Marrying an island woman, he took this social displacement along with him in the microclimate of his family for the first decade of the peace. The second chapter covers Shimao's period of falseness, the time in which he still tried to maintain the unnaturally prominent position his experience on the island had thrust him into. His tensions erupt in his stories, many of which are set in entirely surrealistic surroundings. Any account of his career must explain why he writes precisely this type of story at just this time: the "dream" fiction is characteristic of this time, and he does not write it before or afterwards. The story "Everyday Life in a Dream" is analyzed as the novelist's hara no naka "inner reality" - a fantasy of utter passivity, resenting the present inability of the other, the one above, to take its superior place. (It is most definitely not allegorical of the birth of the writer, but rather of his dissolution.) During this time, the false god is rebelling against his fate, in concealed and indirect way. However, we note that he is also undermining himself in real life, by episodes of poorly concealed infidelity. The third chapter deals with the stories of retrospective confession he wrote after submitting to the leadership of his wife, which used a realistic mode of narration to relate how inadequate he really had been. They are dry relations of inferiority and internal conflict. "When We Never Left Port," the chief work under analysis here, could well have been subtitled, "Why I Was Never Fit to Become a God." The fourth chapter deals with The Sting of Death, the series of linked stories in which Shimao wrote a history of his fall and his wife's rise. "The Sting of Death" - is sin, but what is the primary sin in Christianity? The pride that leads man to set himself equal to or above god - read here, the pride that leads Shimao to set himself equal to or above his wife. His false pride must be broken before they can live in peace, through a long process of interrogation and humiliation. The end product is a reversal of roles, the symbolic death of incarceration in a mental home, and a rebirth into her mileau. The image of their rotten old bamboo fence being replaced with a new, white one drives home the reality of the new god in the shrine of the home. Images of darkness and rain are prominent - the bright, male deity is being extinguished and reborn as a follower Thus Shimao's career may be seen as a journey that began with him in a false role, sinning against his wife in the same way Lucifer sinned against God. "Beware pride, by that sin the angels fell." However, he has a chance to recompense his sin by sacrificing all his poor shreds of individuality on the altar of his wife's worship. When he does, they for the first time enter a state of solidly founded relative happiness, and his work ceases to show the surrealistic strain it demonstrated before. Indeed, it soon degenerates into something rather mediocre and workmanlike. Finally, we attempt a very brief comparison of Shimao and Tanizaki as woman-worshippers. Both are submissions based on blind idealization, but in Tanizaki's case, the submission is made freely - his characters blind themselves with open eyes, so to speak, as in A Portrait of Shunkin (where this is literally true). Tanizaki's "mad old man" chooses of his own free will to spend eternity beneath the feet of his daughter in law - he wants it, he schemes to have it, for the good reason that this is what he enjoys. Even in slavery he excercises his own powers of free choice. But poor Shimao has no such choice. He can merely struggle along, waiting to be put back in his natural position, that of the shadow. Only then is he happy.

Text

2011-02-10

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/31148

Asian Studies

University of British Columbia

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