Japanese Magical Realism
A Brief Exploration of Fantastical Subversion in Japan's Literature
Aug 7, 2009
When the genre magical realism is mentioned, the typical reaction is to think of Latin American works, however, it is a genre that has developed throughout the world, and aside from Latin America, there are few examples where it has blossomed into commonality as it has in Japan.
Traditional Influences
Although in the Western sense magical realism failed to appear in Japanese writings before the late 1800s, there are a variety of more traditional influences that serve to form the roots of modern Japanese fantasy. Folktales and legends like that of Urashima Taro, the tale of a man who leaves his village briefly to visit an otherworldly palace, only to find that hundreds of years have passed upon his return, are probably the most prominent.
Magical realism has a strong sense of anachronism in its storytelling, and the way that time is warped in Urashima's tale is mimicked in later works. Views of spiritualism can also be found in the kaidan genre of storytelling popularized during the Edo period, which emphasized not only the vengeful qualities of spirits, but the return of reality to normal after the completion of the story, the latter of which is typically viewed as a classical element of Latin American magical realism.
Meiji Era Synthesis
Two authors in particular can be considered the fathers of Japanese magical realism. Hagiwara Sakutarou and Natsume Souseki are two authors who continue to maintain a significant influence in the Japanese nearly a century after their deaths, and both were heavily influenced by European writings.
Hagiwara was really more of a surrealist than a strictly magical realist writer, but his poetry often contains a sense of detachment from reality, and his classic device of transplanting his own consciousness into other beings and objects is typically representative of magical realist literature.
Natsume Souseki, perhaps Japan's most famous author, is another example of a writer with magical realist tendencies. Specifically, in his work Yume Juya (published in English as Ten Nights' Dreams), synthesized a lot of classic Japanese qualities with his typically more Western writing style. In the story entitled "The First Night," Souseki's protagonist is able to wait a thousand years while his lover is reborn as a flower, which is a quality that many scholars will find reminiscent of certain Latin American works.
Post-Occupation Japan
Two of the most prominent authors in Japanese literature, Kobo Abe and Kawabata Yasunari, also dabbled in magical realism at times. The most famous example of this is Kawabata's short story Kataude, or One Arm, which is the story of a man who magically attaches his lover's arm to his body for a night. The arm gains a life of its own, although the protagonist ultimately rips it off in a fit of fear, returning the world to normalcy.
Kobo Abe dealt with a distinctly more postmodern vision of society. One of his short plays entitled "The Man Who Became a Stick," is of particular interest, as it depicted a man who transforms into a stick as a manifestation of society's rigid structure. The entire play is composed upon the idea of the absurdity of bureaucracy, and it concludes with a statement that many men have become sticks. Typically, it is only in magical realism that the fantastic becomes quite this explicitly literary.
Modern Writers
In more recent history, no author has enjoyed more success than Murakami Haruki, best-selling author of Kafka on the Shore and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Murakami is most famous for completely revolutionizing first person storytelling in Japanese literature (a quality that exists only within the original language versions of his work), but he also dabbles in magical realist fantasy quite a bit.
As seen in Kafka, animals, particularly cats and birds, become able to talk, and throughout many of Murakami's shorter stories fundamentally strange phenomenon occur, only for the world to return to normal as though nothing has occurred by the time the resolution has finished. These are all strong qualities of magical realism, and seem to stem to some extent from traditionalist sources.
Although Japan may not be famous for it, magical realism and fantasy does play a large role in Japan's traditional culture, and as a result it comes into play quite a bit in modern Japanese literature. In the future, this will most likely continue to be produced in larger quantities, and as more works of Japanese literature are translated into English the trend will likely become more apparent.
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