Shimazaki Tōson (1872–1943) may well have been prewar Japan's most prolific man of letters; he was also among its most controversial. Tōson's massive oeuvre left a lasting mark on Japanese poetry, fiction, and literary criticism alike, helping to craft the confessional voice that has become a hallmark of modern Japanese literature. It also left for posterity a singularly rich record of Japan's modernization as experienced by a proud provincial family in decline.
The late William Naff's posthumously published biography mines that record exhaustively. A monumental work in its own right—with lengthy translations from scores of lesser-known writings, a substantial “Index of important persons,” and eighty dense pages of notes—The Kiso Road represents a fitting tribute to its prolific subject. Unable to support his growing family through teaching alone, Tōson drove himself to produce thousands of pages of prose during his seventy-one years; his collected works in Japanese run to more than thirty volumes. To the extent that “no one who wishes to understand Japan during this period can afford to overlook the life and work of Shimazaki Tōson” (p. 520), Naff deserves our thanks for making that life and work accessible as never before.
As a biographer, Naff's self-described challenge was to discern the kernels of fact in Tōson's copious outpouring of quasi-autobiographical fiction and artful memoir. This was, after all, a writer for whom soul baring alternated with calculated concealment; “confession and privatism” were “the poles between which Tōson's personal and professional lives would oscillate” (p. 147). For all that, Naff's approach to his material is surprisingly literal. Except where contradictory testimony is available, he treats the protagonist of one story after another as a thinly disguised alter ego of the author, drawing freely on the fiction to make claims about Tōson's inner life. While it may not satisfy the critical sensibilities of this journal's readership, such a method does make for riveting reading.
Naff genuinely admires Tōson's cohort, who came of age during the heady years of the 1880s and ‘90s. An early chapter vividly recreates the breathless atmosphere of those days, capturing the excitement felt by young intellectuals for whom every newly translated work of French philosophy or Russian fiction held dazzling novelties. At a moment when whole new horizons of expressive possibility were opening up, Tōson established himself early on as a trailblazer. Naff credits his first published work—the popular 1897 poetry anthology Young Herbs—with effectively forging a modern poetic language for Japan: an idiom at once plain-spoken and lyrical, in which writer and readers could share a newfound intimacy. In one flight of rhetorical rhapsody, he christens Tōson “the singer of a young Japan” who helped “to break the emotions free of [their] stifling Tokugawa prison” (p. 218).
The same imperative animated the narrative fiction to which Tōson soon turned. The Shimazaki clan's private life during these decades was truly tumultuous, and their literary scion was not afraid to let the nation in on his family's scandalous secrets. Beneath the veneer of honor provided by their traditional status as a lineage of hereditary village headman, the family was ravaged during Tōson's lifetime by mental illness, physical infirmity, financial incompetence, sexual impropriety, and a devastating house fire. Reduced to poverty in part by the profligacy of his troubled relatives, Tōson himself suffered from cramped quarters, embarrassing debts, and the torment of watching several of his loved ones succumb to hunger, sickness, depression, and premature death. Drawing as they did on these painful family dramas, it is little wonder that his confessional works created a public sensation.
While broadly sympathetic with his subject, Naff is not averse to stern judgments where he finds them warranted. As a man, Tōson is censured repeatedly for his conduct toward the young women with whom he became romantically entangled. As a writer, he is chided for refusing to ingratiate himself even a little bit with his readers (“his model was the preacher, not the entertainer” [p. 142]). And in the most frequent formulation, Tōson is faulted for having a singularly “limited imagination” (p. 22, 411, 519). This oft-repeated pronouncement serves to justify Naff's literalist approach to Tōson's fiction, making it appear only reasonable to use novels and short stories as a direct window into the author's inner struggles.
While that strategy is surely not without its risks, The Kiso Road unequivocally succeeds in conjuring the texture of Japan's modernization as lived experienced. Readers will come away with a rich sense of how it must have felt to seek one's way in the world, within the confines of a large and desperate family, through the ups and down of the prewar and interwar years. One of the features that makes Tōson compelling is his tortured relationship to place: from the Kiso Valley that he left as a child, to the provincial towns where he taught as a struggling young writer, to the neighborhoods in Tokyo and Paris where he lived and wrote in his mature years. A signal strength of Naff's approach is his attentiveness to this spatial dimension of Tōson's life. The resulting biography operates on many scales, continually probing the intersections that linked Tōson's personal and familial fortunes with the fates of his native-place, the Japanese nation, and the wider world. For this reader, at least, the way the book frames one family's melodrama simultaneously on a domestic, regional, and world-historical canvas is one of its chief attractions.
In that regard, it is worth noting that the litany of hardships suffered by the Shimazaki constitutes a bracing counterpoint to the sunnier image of the gōnō class that might be derived from Gail Bernstein's recent family biography, Isami's House (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). Social historians have long understood that the fear of financial ruin constantly hounded the Japanese rural elite, whose positions in a competitive commercial order could be wrecked by a single dissolute heir or a string of bad luck in the market. If their prosperity was precarious even before the opening of the ports, such families were rendered much more vulnerable by the dislocations of Meiji. We can be grateful to Shimazaki Tōson—and to his dedicated biographer, William Naff—for helping us appreciate the anguish of those whose fortunes, dreams, and dignity alike were crushed under the new regime.
