Atelier Aterui:Three Hybrid Japanese Joyceans: Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Sei Ito and Haruki Murakami

Three Hybrid Japanese Joyceans:

Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Sei Ito and Haruki Murakami

Eishiro Ito

Abstract

     In Japan, many novelists, especially naturalistic writers, have struggled to show their originality and have written novels dealing with the author’s private life or using autobiographical details since the early twentieth century.  Since the introduction of Joyce by Yonejiro Noguchi in 1918, many ambitious novelists, including the first Korean modernist writer Taewon Park, were influenced by Joyce’s innovative narrative technique, styles and methods of Modernism while they also learned how to write fictions with the autobiographical elements from him.  Akutagawa left a memorandum in which he confessed how he was shocked with Joyce’s narrative method used in the first chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  Ito began to struggle to translate the whole text of Ulysses into Japanese soon after reading it.  Probably their reactions to Joyce’s works were not unusual for Japanese novelists at that time.  Haruki Murakami is different from the two precursors in that reading Japanese translations of foreign novels affected his style in Japanese.
     Japanese Joycean writers have learned or borrowed some literary techniques from Marcel Proust and Joyce; especially, the interior monologue and the stream-of- consciousness.  However, none of the three Japanese writers seem to have succeeded to use those techniques.  It is noted that both Akutagawa and Ito were influenced by Irish literature, characteristically first by Yeats’ poetry and then by Joyce’s novels.  Both learned Romantic poetry and then transitioned to write fictions starting autobiographical novels like Joyce.  Although Murakami has a more complicated literary background than these two writers, he is also influenced by Proust and nineteenth-century European writers as well as American hard-boiled writers.
     For these three hybrid Japanese writers, James Joyce is a very provocative writer.  They enthusiastically learned Western literature and tried to compound the elements of traditional Japanese literature and Western literature to create their hybrid literature.

Keywords: James Joyce, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Sei Ito, Haruki Murakami, the interior monologue, the stream-of-consciousness, autobiographical novels

The full version is available in James Joyce Journal, Vol.18, No.2.
(The James Joyce Society of Korea), Winter 2012, 207-235.