Here’s another question: How do you find (if at all) that Japanese aesthetics and style inform these stories? I’ve always learned reductive statements like “Japanese art and poetry is very concerned with nature,” and I both know these statements are incomplete and also don’t know anything at all about Japanese prose. Do you find that, for instance, the aesthetic of haiku has any relation to dominant Japanese prose styles of the period you’re reading? If there are ways in which the Japanese stories are different from various types of European and American stories you’ve read, ways that you can identify and articulate, I’d love to hear about it.
That's such an interesting question! I hope I'm able to answer this in not too many words.* Honestly, I'm not an expert in Japanese literature at all, and it is such a vast thing that I don't know where to start. I will say this: I don't think there is much difference between Japanese and Western
short stories of the period I'm reading.
My current period, Meiji, (1868-1912) was a time of intense Westernization of literature, especially prose. Some of pre-modern poetic forms (like haiku) endured, but as far as the prose goes, nearly everything changed, from genres to themes to the language itself. That's because the writers spearheading the changes were hugely influenced by Western literature – especially men writers, who studied foreign languages, often spent time abroad, and were au courant with new literary trends, with Western philosophy, psychology, etc. The authors of the three above stories are good examples. Kunikida Doppo was one of the main proposers of naturalism in Japan, Kinoshita studied German language and translated German literature, Kafū studied and worked in the US and France and was an admirer of French literature. They have a lot of references to Western literature in their works (in Kafū's story there is an excerpt from Baudelaire
in French), allusions to European history, Greek mythology, Christianity. Now women writers of the time were more likely to be influenced by the pre-modern Japanese literature – Higuchi Ichiyō and Tazawa Inabune, for example, still wrote in classical Japanese, Ichiyō's themes were similar to those in popular Edo fiction, etc.
One thing only comes to mind, and that's the semi-biographical character of some of the stories (the last two, for example), which can be tied to the so-called I-novel genre. The I-novel originated in Japanese naturalism movement and is a type of a story written in first person, in which the author uses some events of their own life, and writes the novel seemingly without a plan or structure, with a lot of digressions, asides, and musings. But other than that, I haven't noticed anything I haven't seen in European or American stories.
I know that it sounds irrelevant to the question, but there is an enormous gap between pre-modern and modern Japanese literature mainly due to the fact that the pre-modern literature was written in classical Japanese (which changed subtly since the classical Heian period, but still was not the same as the spoken language), or even classical Chinese, or a mix of both. Respectable poets and writers – men – wrote in Chinese. The whole aesthetics and symbolism was tied to these two languages. In Meiji there was a successful literary movement to replace these old written languages with vernacular Japanese, to improve literacy and education, and therefore to speed up modernization. In addition to that, the popular literature of the previous Edo period went out of fashion,
because it was deemed barbaric and uncivilized (not only that, but kabuki theatre, which has very close ties with it, was nearly abolished altogether as the relict of feudalism). Whole genres just vanished.
What is known to the West and to modern Japanese people today as "typically Japanese" prose, is mostly the literature of the Heian imperial court (from about 1100 years ago) because a) it was refined enough to be popularized and translated both into modern Japanese and foreign languages, b) because it is taught in Japanese schools. These stories are about impermanence of all things, they are melancholy, sometimes tragic, their language is subtle, the emotions understated, and they often contain a lot of poetry. BUT this is only one side of the pre-modern Japanese literature. The other side is the popular literature of the Edo period (1600-1868): ghost stories, adventure stories, romances, stories about courtesans and criminals, moralistic Buddhist stories, etc. These are almost unknown in the West and largely unknown in today's Japan,
because in Meiji period they were deemed barbaric and uncivilized. You won't find Edo period lit – almost 300 years of it – on the school curriculum! It does have stuff of great literary merit, some of the leading authors have their own Wiki pages, but it is not what you would think "typically Japanese" – the stories are sensual, violent, bawdy, vulgar, dramatic, funny, dynamic, very over the top. You would be hard pressed trying to find something tame enough to teach Japanese children and youth. They are also extremely difficult to read. I'm only barely familiar with Edo literature outside of kabuki theatre, but these popular stories often share themes with kabuki plays. As you might know, I wrote a book set in Meiji period. I have learned a lot about plotting and twists from kabuki, I have used a lot of kabuki tropes, and frankly I'm worried that someone will tell me that these are not Japanese enough.
So – I don't think there is a set of characteristics unique to the Japanese literature as a whole. There is a lot of truth in that statement about the role of nature in traditional Japanese art and poetry, but – I don't think that it's all that different from the "Western" literature... I think that maybe it's just that the symbolism is different, and when Japanese poetry gets translated, the symbolism has to be additionally explained? And it's perhaps worth noting that the forms in which nature is allowed to appear in poetry, for example, are highly codified and rigorous. For example, haiku cannot function without an allusion to the season, meaning that it has to have a seasonal keyword, otherwise it's not a haiku but a
senryū; and if you use, let's say, the word
akebono (daybreak), it means you are writing about spring. No one cares that there are daybreaks in winter and summer too, it's spring in your poem, point blank period. And haiku is not as rigorous as other poetry forms, because it is a lowbrow type of poetry! It's so interesting that it is considered such a pinnacle of literary elegance in the West. In Japan it's treated as a sort of a word game. Children are taught how to write haiku in 3rd grade.
There is an interesting literary form combining haiku and prose, called
haibun, often used in diaries, travelogues, essays and such, but not so much in short stories.
*I failed