Literature Guanlan Book Club
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The members of the "Heguang Reading Club" are teachers and students of the Chinese Dialects and Literature Discipline Of Dalian University of Technology, and the host is Dai Yaoqin, which was launched in June 2018. In 2019, some members of the book club participated in a series of reading activities on the China Writers Network to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Macao's return to the motherland, and "Heguang" has shown a clearer positioning: the master's degree, the "post-90s" and "post-00s", the intersection of arts and sciences, and the promotion of reading and creation at the same time in the form of theme salons and writers' classes.
"In Sekizaki", "Reconciliation":
The moment of the frog into the ancient pool with harmony
Author: [Japanese] Naoya Shiga
Publisher: Beijing United Publishing Co., Ltd
Publication date: March 2022
Moderator: Dai Yaoqin
Japan's "Birch School" emphasizes people-oriented, pays attention to humanitarian and social issues, and supports creators to devote themselves to social transformation. The "Shirakaba" master classified Naoya Shiga as a "conciliatory" private fiction writer, and the emotional flow of the text closely followed his own life experience, and this "truth" often felt slightly surprised or perverse because it was based on personal and private. Standing at the crossroads of the times, Shiga Naoya was confused, and as an idealist, he was often in a dilemma due to overloaded mental pressure. He maintains his contemplation of the relationship between modernity and tradition, depicting human relations that he can understand but are quite resistant to. Naoya Shiga is known as the "god of Japanese fiction," and Ryunosuke Wasagawa describes his work as "moral cleanliness."
Students of the "Wako" Master's Degree will read Naoya Shiga's "In Jozaki" and "Reconciliation" from the six levels of desire, reconciliation, reconciliation, moment, chance, and train culture, and invite Wang Hailan, president of the Japan Chinese Writers Association and teacher of Sakura Meilin University in Japan, to conduct a guide for this edition of the book club.
Introduction: Wang Hailan
Naoya Shiga was one of the representative writers of the "Shirakaba School" in Japan in the 20th century. In 1910, he co-founded the magazine Shirakaba, along with Sedoku Koji, Takero Arishima, and others. In the "Birch School" that promotes self-assertion and humanitarianism, Naoya Shiga has created a new field based on intuitive observation. He is natural by nature, has extraordinary powers of observation and description, and his simple works are regarded as models for craftsmanship. Many japanese literary circles, such as Ryunosuke Wasagawa and Takuki Kobayashi, have publicly stated that they were deeply influenced by his creative views.
The masterpiece is the first short story "In Jozaki", published in 1917 in "Shirakaba", the novel is set in Shiga's convalescent experience in Jozaki, through the observation of the life and death of small animals, the protagonist has the ultimate thoughts on his own life. Junichiro Tanizaki presents "In Jozaki" as a model of "practical" and "clear" articles. Japanese high school Chinese textbooks, without exception, include the novel, revering it as an "unparalleled masterpiece." Shiga's only novel, Dark Night Walk, serialized in Transformation from 1921 to 1927, tells the story of how people can get rid of physical pain and spiritual wandering, find peace from the mountains, and complete their self-redemption. The work successfully realizes the unity of beauty and ethics. Due to The long-term opposition between Shiga naoya and his father in terms of ideology, the biggest theme of his initial works was "father-son discord", Shiga later became an industrialist, and eventually reconciled with his father, after which he wrote works that eliminated the antagonism between father and son and sought forgiveness, such as the novella "Reconciliation".
Naoya Shiga has always written with a "natural" heart and pursued moral purity, as Ryunosuke Wasagawa commented: he is a "writer who lives life cleanly" and his works have "a poetic spirit based on the Oriental tradition".
@Chen Wen: Desire
Naoya Shiga's exploration of humanitarianism is a kind of "self-centered" excavation, and the desire for the self and the transcendence of it are the themes of the novel. Once the "self" abandons the influence of the perceptual system and the principle of reality, it returns to the primitive "self" governed by instincts and desires. Shiga Naoya's writing of the relationship between desire and reality is very clear in works such as "Otsu Shunji", "Van's Crime", "Kiyobei and Hulu": Shunji, out of his own love desire, looks forward to the joy of love, but I am difficult to be satisfied in reality, and can only be relieved by words; Driven by the Ego, Van committed a crime; Qingbing guards could not protect their own selves, and under the strict suppression of their parents, they could only give up their personal interests. The contradiction between "the self" and the "self" is an important plot design of Shiga's novels. Although the desire of the "original self" is there, the strong "self" of resisting and suppressing desire is also vigorously displayed, and desire is thus wrapped in rational understanding and intellectual struggle.
When the higher, moral, idealistic components of the "self" are developed, they become the "superego" governed by conscience. The conciliation of Naoya Shiga's novels stems from a kind of self-detachment. After he became a father, the empathy inspired by the father's responsibility prompted him to reinterpret his father, making him willing to think differently; And the infiltration and teaching of nature made him truly understand life and death. The "morality of human nature" incubated by internal and external factors drives him to fully immerse himself in a state of harmony. Naoya Shiga chronicles the long path of intellectuals struggling between desire and liberation during the Meiji period, from confrontation to reconciliation.
@Sun Yanqun: Reconcile
Characters build will rings and stage spiritual fights and adaptations. When three-dimensional reality is compressed into a one-dimensional state of mind, the interaction between self-will and reality becomes a method of interpreting the text.
The reconciliation between will and reality. The will breeds in the hotbed of the circle of the outside world, and determines the reality as it is by self-illusion. The world has not changed the established content of a given moment. After a brief contact between the will and reality, the faults and dislocations of perception continue to devour the self, and then the powerful divisions and pains reassemble into the new will of life. The newborn will once again entangles reality, and it once again enters the game of life, repeating a new cycle of illusion-rupture-healing.
The reconciliation between the will and the self. The will grows up in a multitude of individual experiences, when the sense of emptiness solidifies, and the internal drive that stems from the introspection of life begins to confirm the appropriateness of the will. "I" want Ah Shi to be a happy woman, and the panic of rubbing shoulders with death triggers "I" to look at the lives of wild bees, rats, and salamanders. Reality has a fixed operating logic, touching specific emotions, and the vitality that has been domesticated by reality has regained its growth force, which involves the introspection of lazy will. Individuals begin to take stock of mixed lives, filtering out arbitrariness and correcting wanderings. The erosion of nature and emotion will lead to a round of sublimation of life.
The novel hides the will under reality, deduces from contradictions, and reaches the truth at the time of epiphany. The individual will constantly adapts to the "real soil" of reality, relies on the realization of life to complete self-remodeling in a timely manner, and the two reconcile to form a continuous and nested Möbius ring, and the will gazes in the name of life, talking about the past and the future.
@Sun Jiayue: Reconciliation
Naoya Shiga uses poetic language to convey values and emotions. The internal logic of many stories follows the concept of "happiness because of things, sorrow for oneself", trying to explore the fears associated with beauty in the human soul, trying to modulate the best match between giving up and getting, and finally finding that entanglement with reality is nothing more than a kind of spiritual internal friction. He believes in emotions and can resonate with time and space, but they cannot be at the same frequency as moments. The novel tests out a universal sense of loneliness that is detached from individuality.
Death and pain are facts, prompting the protagonist to yearn for nature, the misunderstanding of the elders to rip open the old wounds of the soul, the constraints of relatives to cause emotional estrangement, blood relations have become the haze that the protagonist needs to resist, and every rare family reunion misses the contradiction stitching. From the timeline of the completion of the novel, it can be seen that the protagonist finally reaches a reconciliation with his father, which is actually a reconciliation with himself. Naoya Shiga's work balances between reality and fiction because of his sensitivity to life. Even if the mixed characters continue to appear and interfere with the reading reception, misunderstandings and reconciliations are still patiently building the level of the novel and making the text fuller.
@Zhang Lin: Moments
Matsuo Basho has a haiku: "Next to the idle ancient pond, the frog jumped into the middle of the water and made a sound." "In the quiet and frozen pool of time, there was an accident of sudden intrusion. In Shiga Naoya's novels, there are often such moments, like a frog, in the quiet depths of human nature, swinging a little unexpected. For example, two months after the death of his mother, "I" was looking forward to the beautiful stepmother who was coming. The author also never tries to explain the flow of emotions that are "really felt" but seems to be irrational, leaving a blank space between the cause and effect of the sensory level and calmly facing this "abnormality". In addition, Shiga Naoya does not shy away from the obscurity that suddenly appears in her emotions, such as the joy of the bird from birth to the disgust after death, the happiness of the death of the sheep white head, or the wandering female artist who attracts herself, imagining that the train she is riding derailed, and her head hits the tip of the rock. This kind of darkness flashes by, surprising, but there is its truth, the author is always frank, all the emotional details that flow through the heart to the reader, and does not defend himself, as if the record is the whole. Life in its most subtle place, will also be bordered with the widest place, life emotions from the self jump, to everything to seek empathy and evidence, so Shiga Naoya novels often appear animals and plants, dying and struggling rats and serious injuries when they try to save themselves, ordinary-looking gourds and loved by their father destroyed by their father, two rain frogs and Zanijiro and Ashi couple on the pole, foreign objects and people look at each other, two phases of shock, from the ripples of the lines to approach the truth of the universe.
@Zhang Huimin: Accidental
During the period after the train accident, Naoya Shiga visualized the uneasiness rooted in the experience of life into three allegorical forms. The stiff wild bee and the rat that falls into the water are two sides of the dialectic of life and death, and the two should be the same as Shiga's stubborn pursuit of nature.
The unprovoked death of salamanders is different. At the moment of stone-throwing, the trance-like husband in Van's Crime momentarily overlaps with "I.". When mischief causes unexpected disasters, in this state of mind, the judge who has divided and defended himself no longer exists, so that "I" cannot feel excited by the death of this nasty creature, nor can I rejoice in my survival. Compared with the "tranquility" of wild bees, the "slain Fan Wife" may be closer to the situation of salamanders. She did not die of revenge or the stark fury of hatred. In the absurd, unmediated "murder", the "accident" that came at the same time as death was canceled out of the meaning of death, leaving only a great dazedness.
It's easy for readers to fall into a daze in Naoya Shiga's novels. The story is almost watered down, the passion is often delayed, and the connection between cause and effect becomes loose. Most of the time, the trivial white strokes focus on seemingly insignificant details. His extreme restraint and large amount of white space in fiction often frustrate people in reading efforts that must search for some definite meaning: the unread postcard in "To the Net", Sasaki's unsatisfactory love, Zajiro's gratuitous pity after his wife cheated on him, the lying maid Koishi may not meet the consequences, and the good-doing parliamentarians do not reap the rewards. The power of "chance" constantly shreds the relationship between the self and others, and the gratuitous love and torture between life and each other is almost nihilistic.
When the experience of conflict imposed on the individual mind by civilization, society, and politics is difficult to digest, Shiga pours out doubt and anxiety in his lamentation of subtle impermanence. However, even with the suspicion of avoiding the important and neglecting the important, this lament does not point to a complete self-closure, just like the repeated self-criticism before the completion of "Reconciliation". Shiga, the "Mr. Fan" who aspires to enter the "real life", has made an attempt to reconcile nature by faithfully recording all the paradoxical, subtle, and incomprehensible events around him. Pessimistic but not negative openness may be the key to Shiga Naoya's differentiation from contemporaries of private fiction writers.
@Liu Yan: Tram culture
In the 1860s, the Meiji Restoration became the target of Japan's modernization, and since then Japan's railway construction has flourished. In 1895, Kyoto gave birth to Japan's first streetcar, and "tram culture" began to take root in many Japanese literary works, and Naoya Shiga was the first writer to let "train" into the novel, as exemplified by "In Jozaki" and "Reconciliation".
As a product of convenient modern technology, the landscape "tram" frequently appeared in Shiga Naoya's novels recreated the physical space between urban and rural areas while building new interpersonal relationships. The tram of "To the Net" drives from Ueno Station to Utsunomiya, and "I" share the worries of the women in the same carriage, and the postcards sent on behalf of me invisibly weave another link; In "In Seongzaki", "I" was hit by a train of the Yamanote Line and went to The Castlezaki Onsen alone to recuperate, thus meditating on life and death through the encounters of wild bees, rats, and salamanders; The Apprentice's God is one of the earliest tram lines in Tokyo, and it is both the only way for apprentice Senkichi to get from Kanda to a sushi restaurant and a train avenue where Councilor A "escapes" after his death. From being resisted by the general public in the 1880s to becoming the artery of Japan's economic development, the "tram" has inadvertently smoothed the folds of the mood of the times and become a living footnote to the great changes in modernization.
The behemoth of the "tram" was by no means a complete existence for the Japanese people at that time. In "Righteous Faction", the train bound for the EishiroBashi bridge in the direction of nihonbashi crushes the five-year-old girl to death, from the repetition of "excitement-loss" to the crying after being drunk, and the testimony of railway workers to satisfy the "sense of morality" may lead to unemployment. In "Gray Moon", the tram driving in the direction of Shibuya after World War II is constantly laughing and amusing, but "I" am powerless in the face of the young workers who have sat on the station due to physical weakness, and feel the loss of the post-war people in the spiritual "circle". In "Go to the Net", even if "I" have no complaints, women still "don't go away" because their children destroy the distance of public space. Trams are portrayed as modern containers of "shame", still speaking for capital and power.
Shiga examines the modern civilization represented by the train, but when the train to Atami in "True Crane" speeds through the cape, and the fishermen's children who aspire to become "sailors" think of the picture of the train derailing and falling off a cliff, his text's unconscious intention to pursue nature surfaces: because he cannot enjoy modern civilization and decides to leave from "shame". The writer Ge Fei believes that Shiga Naoya's narrators or narrative spokespersons are suffocated, just like the author himself, who follow the fixed line of "leaving the big city and going to the countryside or deep mountains far away from the hustle and bustle" (Ge Fei: "Shiga Naoya and his "self-affirmation" road" in order to achieve physical escape. In "Yashima Yanagido", the painter lives in the countryside and is fascinated by nature; "Bonfire" focuses on depicting the "cold air full of new green fragrance" in the mountains after the rain that seems to have a sense of "rebirth"; The "Reconciliation Trilogy" ("Shunji Otsu", "Reconciliation", "The Death of a Man and His Sister") is no different, and running away from home and moving is the norm.
The acquitted magician in "Fan's Crime", the unverifiable love affair in "Akasai Oyster", the externalized metaphor at the end of "Rain Frog", and so on, the ending setting is like unexpectedly relaxing the tightened bowstring, in the "moral" link of the trial, using fictional writing techniques to complete the path of narrative "shame" and achieve a "reconciliation" that puzzles the reader.
On the one hand, the seemingly inexplicable "reconciliation" stems from Naoya Shiga's birth into a wealthy samurai family, the love of his grandmother and the practical utilitarianism of his father make "egoism" dominate the mainstream of personality, and "The Encounter of Sasaki", "The God of Apprentices", "Influenza" and other articles implicitly match the class difference between "superior" and "inferior". The "plotless" melodious text and the character settings that do not eat human fireworks, or out of their "pure" instincts. Especially in the middle of the creation influenced by Metlingk's ideas, in order to escape the encouragement of the samurai family and social morality, Shiga Naoya's favor for "reconciliation" reduced the sharpness of the text to a certain extent, and Yu Dafu called it "The Japanese Lu Xun" slightly overstated.
However, not all of Shiga's works tend to be "reconciled". He cast simple compassion for the people at the bottom, such as "Justice Faction" and "Fan's Crime", which are commonly heard every day, "Akasai Oyster" uses the historical fact "Date Riot", and "Gray Moon" reflects the social situation after Japan's defeat in the war. Naoya Shiga, who is often criticized as "egoistic", has indeed tried to break through his own experience, accept the modern civilization represented by the "tram", and face the "shame" as social morality hopes. "I don't see a glimmer of light in my future. But my heart is still burning with the desire to seek light, and I want to let it burn out", perhaps Naoya Shiga has spoken out through the mouth of the protagonist of "Fan's Crime".
(This article was published in the 8th edition of the special issue "Literature Guanlan" jointly organized by China Writers Network and Literature and Art Daily on August 19, 2022)
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Editor: Liu Ya
Second instance: Wang Yang
Third instance: Chen Tao