Japanese writer Hario Sato's "Melancholy of the Countryside" and Chinese writer Tatsuo Yu's "Sinking" are typical novels that dissect melancholy in modern and contemporary China and Japan.
"Sinking" tells the story of a young man in the Republic of China period, who was snubbed by people because of the decline of national fortunes during his study in Japan. Ambition has no chance to be unleashed, youthful vitality has no place to release, and the double setback tempts him to vent his lust in the wrong way, but the ensuing strong self-blame, shame and frustration make him mentally broken, and finally end his life by suicide.
"Pastoral Melancholy" tells the story of a young writer who can't stand the hustle and bustle of the city and the frustration of his career, so he moves to the countryside with his wife and cats and dogs. But the difference between the cultural differences between the country and the people, as well as the monotony of rural life, made him tired. Mental problems never went unsolved, and eventually he became more and more depressed and irritable.
Although the two novels were written in different countries and different authors, they have similar "melancholy" charms, which make people associate when reading. What is the connection between Udō and Hario Sato? Why do their works have such a similar taste?
Yudaf once said: "Among the modern Japanese novelists, the one I admire most is Hario Sato. Of course, the first of his works is to push his birth work "Sick Rose", that is, "Pastoral Melancholy"... I always wanted to learn from him, but finally I couldn't draw the tiger..."
It was Yu Dafu's admiration for Haruo Sato that made him follow Sato Haruo's writing style when creating "Sinking", thus becoming what people call "Sato Haruo Sato of China".
Today I want to analyze the charm behind the works from the two famous works "The Melancholy of the Countryside" and "Sinking".
Yu Dafu's Sinking was published in 1921 and composed during 1919, when China was in the midst of the may Fourth Movement. Haruo Sato's "Pastoral Melancholy" was written around 1916, when Japan was the victorious country in the war and the only imperialist country in Asia, while Japan, which attached importance to the introduction of Western culture, adhered to the wave of abandoning old ideas, thus leaving the literati at that time into an extreme emptiness.
The two books were created in the same era, but there are obvious differences due to different regions and cultures, but the environment in which the two authors are located has similar "difficulties".
The background of the writing of "Sinking"
"Sinking" is an early novel written by Uddhav in the 1920s, and it is also Uddhav's most outstanding masterpiece, which shocked the entire literary world as soon as it was published. The protagonist's experience in the novel is based on Yu Dafu's own experience, and integrates a literati's feelings about the weakness of the country.
In 1915, at the age of 19, Uddhafu was admitted to Nagoya No. 8 High School. After graduating at the age of 22, Udafu traveled from Nagoya to Tokyo. On the way, he wrote this work "Sinking" based on his four years of living in Nagoya.
"Sinking" was published in 1921, and in 1919 there was the May Fourth Movement in China, and the spirit of May Fourth was to oppose imperialism and feudalism. Therefore, when the writers at that time were creating, they were full of this strong patriotic spirit.
Yu Dafu was one of them, and Xia Yan once said of him: "Dafu is a great patriot, and patriotism has become the pillar of his life. Indeed, while creating, Uddhav actively threw himself into the anti-imperialist and anti-Japanese national salvation movement.
Therefore, in his works, there is no doubt that this patriotic plot should be expressed. There is a sentence in "Sinking": "Motherland, motherland, my death is your harm, you are getting rich soon, and if you are strong, you still have many children suffering there." ”
It reflects Uddhav's desperate desire for national strength.
The background to the writing of Pastoral Melancholy
Like "Sinking", "Pastoral Melancholy" is also a novel created by the author based on his own personal experience.
Between April and November 1916, Harsuo Sato left Shingucho, Higashimuro-gun, Wakayama Prefecture and moved to the southern part of Musashino, the countryside of Kanagawa Prefecture. On this trip he took his beloved wife, two dogs, and two cats.
The idyllic scenery left a deep impression on him and also provided inspiration for his later creations.
Based on this experience, Hario Sato created "Pastoral Melancholy", and later Sato Haruo later experienced works completed in three years from 1916 to 1918 through "Pastoral Acrobatics" and "Sick Rose" to "Pastoral Melancholy".
"Pastoral Melancholy" is therefore considered to be a poetic precipitate of his three years of experience and insight.
On the other hand, the works written by Haruo Sato were also deeply influenced by the times, when Japan won the war from China and Russia in the war, and obtained huge capital from it, becoming the only imperialist country in Asia at that time.
Japan, which has a prosperous economy and a stable situation, has also become more open in literary creation and has exchanged ideas with Western countries.
The intrusion of new ideas made the Chinese people rightfully believe that old ideas should be abandoned, and new ideas that could support the literati were slow to be found, thus making the intellectuals at that time feel unprecedented emptiness and melancholy.
With nowhere to vent his "melancholy", Hario Sato had to incorporate them into his work.
Yu Dafu once said: "Literary works are all autobiographies of writers."
Both "Sinking" and "Pastoral Melancholy" are "self-described" novels that unfold with themselves as "models" in terms of narrative. This way of writing pays more attention to the expression of personal emotions and enhances the realism of the work.
The author can express his true feelings, life experience, joys and sorrows, and can express his personality through his works.
Although both works use the same narrative method, there are also inextricable differences in the expression of the themes of the articles. "Sinking" pays more attention to expressing the patriotic feelings of the author, and "The Melancholy of the Countryside" pays more attention to expressing the heart of a small person.
"Sinking": In the posture of a small person, it shows the resistance of society or nation
During his lifetime, he made many Japanese friends and had close ties with Japanese politics, culture, and society in his literary creation.
The influence of "private novels" in Japanese literature was particularly pronounced. The most representative "private novel" writer, Haruo Sato, thus became the object of Yudafu's greatest admiration, and his creative style was also largely influenced by Sato Hario.
"Sinking" describes the experience of a Chinese-Japanese student living in an atmosphere of contempt by others, and his body pins on the loneliness, humiliation and national grief of all international students in society at that time. The experience of the protagonist of the novel is almost exactly the same as that of the author Yu Dafu, as if the author and the characters have long been integrated.
In the expression of the theme, "Sinking" is different from "Pastoral Melancholy", it pays more attention to expressing its patriotic feelings, its desire for national strength, and its expectation of national resistance.
"Pastoral Melancholy": Using Western techniques to describe Oriental literature
Seiichi Yoshida once commented on Hario Sato: "... Analyzing his own loneliness, boredom and melancholy, in his works, is filled with a atmosphere of life at the end of the century due to mental burnout and nervous or sensory allergies... "Pastoral Melancholy" is a strong self-consciousness analysis of the unbearable monotony and tiredness of life, from which it shows a wonderful beauty of the end of the century. ”
"Pastoral Melancholy" embodies the elegant mood of traditional Japanese literature and integrates the "decadent beauty of the end of the century" of modern Western European literature. The outstanding manifestation of its decadent beauty is melancholy. As much as Yudafu, Haruo Sato likes to "describe the traditional themes of Oriental literature in a Western way", and they are equally indulged in the melancholy expressed by decadence, yearning for "a world based on boredom, melancholy and world-weariness, and decadent poetry."
The protagonist of "The Poetry of the Pastoral" is a clean and arrogant but cowardly nameless poet, who does not want to stay in the materialistic secular society and does not want to be disturbed by neon lights, so he chooses to retreat to the idyllic and indisputable life.
Although he has found quiet and beauty in nature, his heart is still melancholy, cultural differences make him unable to communicate with locals, coupled with the monotony of rural life and the difficulty of the city. He could not get rid of his inner melancholy until finally the decadence that could not be stopped.
Throughout "Pastoral Poetry", Hario Sato dissects his own heart, expressing their sorrows with subtle, compact melodies.
In the creation of the novel, both Yu Dafu and Sato Haruo use the "self-narrative style", and the characters of the two are surprisingly consistent in decadence and melancholy, which just shows that Yu Dafu and Sato Haruo already have melancholy seeds in their bodies, which is inseparable from their growth experience.
"Melancholy" and "yearning" under the extremes of Yudaf
Guo Moruo once said in "On Yu Dafu": "Many people think that Dafu is a bit 'decadent', but in fact it is the opinion of Pi Xiang." Li Chuli once said, "Dafu is a simulated Tang dynasty, a puritan in essence."
Guo Moruo's evaluation of Yu Dafu stems from the emotions expressed in Yu Dafu's works, and Yu Dafu's articles all carry the essence of "melancholy" and "autobiographicality", and you can always feel a faint sadness when reading carefully. This style and characteristics of Uddhav are inextricably linked to his childhood and adolescence experiences.
In Uddhav's memoirs, he defined his birth as "tragic": "In the middle of the night of the third day of november in the twenty-second year of Guangxu, a tragedy that was not very well structured and unfinished was born. ”
Most writers always like to use flowery words when describing their lives, defining a life as beautiful and full of longing. Yu Dafu is just the opposite, not only without the slightest boast, but also full of sentimentality, and also shows Yu Dafu's sincerity under this light brushstroke.
Yu Dafu's childhood life was extremely difficult, less than one year old because of malnutrition suffered from gastrointestinal diseases, more than a year, debilitation, fever, cramps and other symptoms, so that the whole family exhausted. When he was three years old, his father died of illness, and his mother had to take him and his two brothers to set up a stall for a living.
Because of the age difference with their two older brothers, they went out to study early, and their mother also went out because of work. The young Uddhav could only live with his grandmother, who knew only to eat and pray to the Buddha every day. The shadow of "loneliness and melancholy" thus took root in Yu Dafu's body.
In 1913, the 17-year-old Yu Dafu went to Japan with his eldest brother to study, and Yu Dafu, who was baptized by Japan's open culture, could not let go of the Chinese who were in the water heat, and he thought that he had the responsibility to do something for the motherland. In 1917, at the age of 21, Yu Dafu first came to Japan's "Gentle Township" and experienced the warmth of women.
After returning to China, his mother asked him to marry Miss Sun, and it was also at this moment that his inner conflict began to erupt, looking at the strength of his country, and then looking at the ignorance of his countrymen, he did not even have the freedom to marry, so Yu Dafu, who had nowhere to vent, turned his dissatisfaction into inner "melancholy" in the text.
He has his own yearning for a better life, but he has nowhere to put his emotions, and eventually can only go to the extreme of "melancholy".
Haruo Sato's "melancholy" stems from the extreme "self-esteem" of the heart
Hario Sato was born into a family of nine generations of medical practitioners, a family of scholars, and both his grandfather and father were good at creating traditional genres such as sentences, wild songs, and Chinese poems.
"Haruo Sato, who grew up under the influence of this middle-class literary atmosphere, is convinced of his unique literary talent."
Based on this self-confidence, Sato Hario also has considerable self-esteem. In his later years, in his "Lessons from Ego", he said: "If we can become artists, then I am not qualified to stand in any corner of this society, please do not mistake this as inferiority, this is my self-esteem." ”
When Sato Haruo was very young, he showed a different ambition from his family, and he wanted to be a literary creator. However, his early school experience hit him, and in Meiji 42, at the literary and artistic lecture of Ikuta Nagasunaga and others held in the city, in order to fill the time before the speaker arrived, Sato Haruo gave a speech, but this speech caused a lot of problems in the education circle, so he was suspended by the school for indefinite time.
Shortly after this suspension, he committed many more crimes. Such as being designated as a firefighter or the like. Such an experience distorted Haruo's personality, and it can also be said that the seeds of melancholy were sown.
When reality and ideals clashed again as adults, and the path of art was blocked, Hario Sato "turned his critical gaze to his inner self, and at the same time he firmly believed in his artistic talents and developed a strong uneasiness." In this introspection, As a self-respecting artistic youth, Sato Haruo's oversensitive self-awareness puts him under great pressure, and this pressure even carries a certain degree of masochism.
The heavy pressure caused him to be tired and decadent, and anxiously "fled" from the city to the countryside "forgotten by the world and abandoned by civilization". The pathology of the writer in the countryside is the product of this high self-esteem and great pressure, and is the projection of Sato Haruo's personal feelings.
In the third year of Taisho, Haruo Sato and actress Yukawa-ro Kako lived together, and the two began a new life at No. 9 Hinata Street in Hongo-ku, where they lived for about a year. In the spring of the fifth year of Taisho, they came to Nakasato Village, The Town of Kanagawa, where he completed his debut novel "The Spanish Hound", and also created "Sick Rose" based on the background of life, and it was also in this village that Hario Sato completed the creation of "Pastoral Melancholy".
Although Yu Dafu and Sato Haruo are people from two different countries, their characters have similar pathologies and similar melancholy personalities.
"Sinking" and "Pastoral Melancholy" are similar in the construction of writing methods and frameworks, but they are very different in spiritual expression. Both Udafu and Hario Sato also have a melancholy state of mind, but the causes are very different.