Three Modern Novelists: Soseki, Tanizaki, Kawabata

by Van C. Gessel

This volume traces the lives and careers of three literary giants and their varying responses to Japan's increasing internationalization.

Genres: Nonfiction, Japanese Literature, Literary Criticism, Biography, Japan, Research

207 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1993

About the author

Van C. Gessel was born in Compton, California, and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah. He joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints there in October 1968. He served as a missionary to Japan from 1970-71. He received a Ph.D. in Japanese literature from Columbia University in 1979, and he has taught as a faculty member at Columbia, Notre Dame, UC Berkeley, and Brigham Young University. He was chair of Asian and Near Eastern Languages at BYU and dean of the College of Humanities.

Dr. Gessel has published six translations of literary works by the Japanese Christian novelist Endō Shūsaku, including The Samurai and Deep River. Another Endō novel, The Life of Kiku, will appear soon in his translation. He co-edited, with Reid Neilson, a volume of essays titled Taking the Gospel to the Japanese: 1901 to 2001, which received the Geraldine McBride Woodward Award from the Mormon History Association for the best international Mormon history publication. He co-edited The Shōwa Anthology and served as co-editor, with J. Thomas Rimer, of The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature (Volume 1 published in 2005, Volume 2 in 2007).

In the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he has served as bishop and a stake president at BYU. From 2005-2008, he presided over the Oregon Portland Mission of the Church.

He and his wife, Elizabeth Darley Gessel, are the parents of three children, and they have five grandchildren.

Reviews

[Smiley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book “Three Modern Novelists: Soseki, Tanizaki, Kawabata” by Prof. Van C. Gessel should deservedly be a delight to those avid readers of these three remarkable literary giants of modern Japan due to its fine narrations, authoritative references and twelve pages of rare photos. However, the three novelists’ readership has probably depended on such readers’ preferences nationwide/worldwide; thus, one may read any novelist’s biography one prefers first or the other way round. As for me, the first one I have long admired was Kawabata when I knew he was an awardee of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1968, the first Japanese ever, and enjoyed reading his novels and short stories since some years ago, then I read Tanizaki and Soseki in which I can’t help getting interested and eventually wondered “Tanizaki who?” and “Soseki who?”

One of the reasons is that I’ve never read either Tanizaki or Soseki in Thai/English translations before so the two queries came up as the giants I think I should read because their works are famously acclaimed. Reading them in the original to render should be challengingly done by those Japanologists with advanced degrees in Japanese like Prof. Donald Keene, Prof. John Bester, Prof. John Nathan, Prof. Royall Tyler, Prof. Dennis Washburn, and so on. As for those who enjoy reading translations, they should be content with what they can understand and appreciate rather than the Japanese texts which are definitely Greek to them.

The following extracts taken from each biography should be three introductory glimpses as the starting points for their inspired readers to find this book to read in full or the mentioned novels themselves.

Kawabata:
In 1953 Kawabata was elected a member of the Japan Art Academy, along with Nagai Kafu. … 1954 saw the completion of ‘Sound of the Mountain’ and ‘The Master of Go’. If Kawabata’s early writings are best represented by “The Izu Dancer,” in which the distance between characters takes the form of the gulf separating the shy student from the beautiful but immature dancer; and if mid-career works such as ‘Snow Country’ display an emotional breach opening between a man unwilling to commit himself and a woman who cannot live without such a bond; … (p. 184)

Tanizaki:
Less than two months after the end of the war, even before he had made preparations to move his family from their place of refuge in Atami back to Kansai. … Both Tanizaki and Kafu had become something on the order of national cultural heroes after the defeat because of their refusal to cooperate with the military, and a series of public honors were bestowed on them. A few months after publishing the second part of ‘The Makioka Sisters,’ Tanizaki was invited to the Kyoto Imperial Palace along with several other writers, and they held a discussion of Japanese literature in the presence of Emperor Hirohito. … (p. 125)

Soseki:
In November of 1907, a man who had worked as a miner joined the Soseki household. The story of his life Soseki transformed into the novel ‘Kofu’ (The Miner), which he finished by January of the following year. This was followed by the works that are usually described as belonging to Soseki’s “middle period,” highlighted by the trilogy of novels comprising ‘Sanchiro’ (1908), ‘Sorekara’ (And Then, 1909), and ‘Mon’ (The Gate, 1910). … (pp. 55-56)

In summary, reading these biographies should guide the keen readers to better understand their lives as imminent novelists as well as their struggle for distinction in an approximate 100-year span of modern change in Japan and the world so that we would read their works with awe, respect and admiration.

[Kamakana · Rating 3 out of 5]

250913: interesting. promising more than it delivers, this compilation of lives personal and literary does find an overarching structure to these three novelists. have read several works of each, but knew close to nothing about their lives- but the theme of their somewhat self-conscious relation to ancient Japan and the modern world, is plausible, but not detailed enough to be more bio than appreciation and suggestion...