Yokai Through Modernity;
Towards the End of Culture
by Kingyo no Shinkeishitsu
原典
The Japanese literary tradition is often said to have begun with the Kojiki.[1] This “Record of Ancient Matters” claims that the cosmos condensed out of the chaos of nothing which was named. Thus, the Kojiki names those things which began all-creation: many gods and deities; the first man and woman so called the “Male-Who-Invites” and the “Woman-Who-Invites” who dipped a jeweled spear into the ocean and stirred, thus forming the Japanese home islands. This same man and woman —also called Izamagi(male) and Izanami(female)— when copulating for the first time produced a corrupted being, and because their coupling took place after Izanami spoke; so, when coupling the next time, Izanagi speaks first and what is born is lovely.[2] We also learn that what dies does not merely pass away. It continues to impose its desires upon the living. Those desires are an unquenchable hunger for what was and what can never be again. We know all of these things by trusting in the old sages. This is how we can perceive the establishment of ideas concerning the righteousness of creative-expression in the Japanese literature.
For the Japanese, if we are to understand them as “Japanese,” —and not and unnamable peoples geo-located in the western-Pacific— (like all peoples) their myths were first bound to an oral tradition. Ideas could only pass between peoples if they were carried by the sound of a living body. However, with the compiling of the Kojiki, the now-Japanese were able to instantiate new and permanent associations for words bound to a lifeless and condensable body. It was no longer a man or woman who spoke, it was a text. And, critically, the Kojiki established for the creation of human life the tremendous power our words affect upon all who learn them. This new canon was able to project ideas across time and space complicating notions of existence inside the minds of a now literate population. As a result, the stories read, had both meaning and action —in perpetuity. For the individual human being who examines questioning-thoughts about the types of supernatural confrontations dictated through out Japanese literary history, the form of these thoughts necessarily changes as ideas about what humanity creates has changed.[3]
So, the modern era of Japanese literature saw the development of new ways for supernatural creatures to better articulate the uncertainty of a rapidly changing spatio-temporal reality; a reality which was, in no small part, belligerently thrust upon the Japanese by western colonial powers whose militaristic march across the world had finally arrived at the terminus of the east; a reality which was not answerable to ancient myths. However, the old sages had provided the apparatus through which the fantastic problems of the soul would remain realizable.
[2] Horne, Charles F. The Sacred Books and Early Literature of the East: with Historical Surveys of the Chief Writings of Each Nation ... Parke, Austin, and Lipscomb, Inc., 1917, pp. 14-17
[3] There is a political power dynamic at work as well. The Kojiki is not only an origin tale for the cosmos in the broadest possible sense, it is also the origin tale for the Japanese Imperial line. Because of this, the political power structures are also codified. This allowed rulers with a claim of divine right to appropriate the spiritual wheel of law of the dharma, which arrived in Japan in the sixth century, less than two-hundred years before the compiling of the Kojiki while as the same time develop Confusion practices into their burgeoning national identity. By doing so, a hegemony established control of nearly all cultural practices.
変化
Modernity promised an end to the old narratives. It promised to cure diseases by treating the causes of physical suffering, and not merely the symptoms. It promised to the free the mind from the constraints of archaic beliefs which stood against quantifiable observations. It promised to free the soul from a need for mystic yearnings. Modernity built great big cities and drew people out of the countryside. Workers travelled across extraordinary distances towards what was becoming one of the world’s greatest Metropolises, Edo, now called Tokyo. According to Michael Foster, “[T]he railroad was both a sign of modernity and modernity itself, the superlative metonym of this age of rapid transition…”[4] But this age, with its ceaseless desire for progress also led to the alienation of a people unprepared for the titanic shifts that would change what it meant to be live.
Perhaps seeking to confront the losses suffered during the Great Kantō earthquake, Toyoshima Yoshio wrote Ghost of the Metropolis (Tokai no yūki, 1924). This is story of a young man consumed by the alienation he feels while working in the rapidly rebuilt Tokyo during the interwar years. The story begins by describing all the spaces people fill in the city. He describes how “There is not a single crack that human eyes have not yet spotted…”[5] He goes on to say that the city contains every type of vile person. But that many of these places are filled with emanations of the people who used to be there. Then one night on a walk home, after some time spent playing cards and drinking, he experiences a strange sensation. It feels to him like he is being followed. It is not until he finally arrives at his residence and sees his large clock’s pendulum swinging does the feeling leave him. But this particular experience is just the first of many. He begins to feel strange presences wherever he goes. The feeling is most pronounced in those spaces between spaces, alleys and entry ways, train platforms and under awnings. The time of day plays its part as well. It seems whenever the world is in flux that his mind is able to wonder, and intrusive thoughts are able to take hold. Anything that he can not control, all those things humans are unable to shine their light upon, becomes of source of tension and worry. Many unanswerable questions for the living impose themselves upon his troubled mind. Yet, as he has more and more of these experiences he learns to adjust. His paranoia becomes just another part of his bustling day. He goes out at night to drink and satisfy his bodied needs. All kinds of conveniences which did not exist before the modern era help him through his day. But late at night more and more dreadful experiences keep happening. Yet, he remains able to calm himself when he arrives at his residence and sees the pendulum of the clock swinging. Yet, as he spends more time out in the city, the troubling experiences become more common place and he has a harder and harder time coping. So, he decides to spends more and more time at home. But then, even his dreams become a disturbed realm of uncertainty. It turns out that a previous occupant of the room he had been living, who was where a student that failed his entrance exams, had hanged. The young man asks if he can have another room, but he remains disturbed by the world around him. At the end of the story the young man comes to the conclusion that restless spirits of the dead have taken the freedom promised to the people alive today.
This story reveals the troubling consequences of ceaseless modern progress faced by a person who no longer has time to tend to his soul. This is one of the fundamental problems within the modern dilemma. We can build great cities in an incredibly short amount of time. But that kind of change ignores the amount of time it necessarily takes for a person to internalize what those changes mean. The Kojiki hundreds of years before, had sought to answer the very same questions of “how did we get here? And where do we go when we die” Some generations or epochs are able to answer these questions. But as time passes and the circumstances for life changes humanity also seems to ask again, “how is that so much suffering and uncertainty, so much circumstance and sudden change can take place without anyone knowing why?” The enlightenment provided a principle for how to measure those changes in the world. On the other hand, the arts broadly, and literature linguistically, reveals for humans a way to understand the types of questions we ask ourselves about why create the things we create. So when a metropolis like Tokyo is wrecked by an unforeseen disaster far beyond the realm of human control, and at the same time the surrounding countryside suddenly shifts from a day-night cycle dictated by the sun, to a work rest cycle controlled by the clock of industry, tremendous unease is easily manifested. Progress does not seem to provide security or answers for why? So, it is not unreasonable for people to default back to old ways of understanding the problems of the soul. In fact, this is precisely the function stories of the supernatural can provide for people having difficulty reconciling the failed promises of progress. By paring the needs of the living with respect for the dead we preserve our humanity. Stories such as Ghost of the Metropolis remind us of our how we can do this; how we can reconcile the fear of the unknown by sharing that fear with others.
腐敗
After the end of World War II, Japan experienced an “economic miracle.” It rapidly changed its wartime economy into a commercially based one along those lines controlled by the occupying American forces. These changes saw an end to the Imperial military that in many ways was the greatest symbol of Japan for the first part of the 20th century. The loss of the war was the next blow to the Japanese identity which had been in flux since the start of the modern period. Just as the Great Kantō earthquake could not be reconciled through the mere rebuilding of Tokyo, the forced change to democratic rule would not necessarily result in the ownership, for the individual Japanese citizen, of a government system which is intended as an expression of the will of the people. In fact, it could be argued that the loss of the war was the death of the will of the Japanese people, and in some part due to the terms of surrender. What has taken place since, has furthered the inward looking unconscious questioning which identifies much of the modern era as seen in stories like Ghost of the Metropolis.
The dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 were not entirely unlike the the earthquake which ravaged Tokyo in 1923. Each event resulted in widespread destruction and death. The scars of each event persisted for the lifetimes of those who experienced them. But it can at least be said of an earthquake that it is not the direct result of human decision making. It is happenstance manifested in the chaos of an unknowable future. However, after the horrors of World War II, and in light of humanities willful attempt to annihilate types of our species, the link between the problems of the individual soul, and it’s relationships to the collective demands of civilization inspired in many people across many parts of the globe a desire to solve the problems of the soul by pretending as if they did not have one. After all, it was the old narratives, the old forms, and the ancient ways which had caused so much of the pain and suffering during the first half of the 20th century. The end to the fighting was only able to transpire as a result of the greatest destructive force humanity had ever created. This force would mushroom over the course of the middle decades of the 20th century into something capable of destroying all human life in an instant. That instant can only be realized in combination with an unknowable number of diplomatic failures. It is impossible to imagine the series of events that could lead to such catastrophe. However, the apparatuses are in place.
So it is that once again we ask ourselves what is it that haunts us? What supernatural force can bend the will of the world in an unknowable way? Is the destruction, on the small scale of cities, inevitable and independent of human action; then what of the large scale destructions resulting from nuclear war, or even more prescient, climate change? These are the problems, in the theoretical and critical realms, that yokai were once able to identify. But because it is not merely a question of happenstance, but of a moral corruption and on a scale that involves all human life, a corruption that is undeniably and fundamentally human as told through out all modern literary traditions, the psychic and emotional weight of which is seemingly too great for the person writing today to confront in an objective and inclusive way. What results is a contemporary creative landscape which —rather than pacify the problems of the soul— chooses to placate the problems of the soul. We no longer attempt to speak for everyone through our shared turmoil and uncertainties. Instead we speak to ourselves in a commercially driven and economically motived way. We don’t have to ask tough questions or confront our personal fears if we’re endlessly distracted by fun.[6]
[6] https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1949/faulkner/speech/
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Foster, Michael Dylan. 2012. Haunting modernity: Tanuki, trains, and transformation in japan. Asian Ethnology 71.
Foster, Michael Dylan. Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yokai. University of California Press, 2009.
Foster, Michael Dylan, and Kijin Shinonome. The Book of Yokai: Mysterious Creatures of Japanese Folklore. University of California Press, 2015.
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