Sokolova-Yamashita Kiyomi (Professor, Department of Literary Arts, Nihon University College of Art)
1 Depicting the land, depicting humanity
The novels of Hayashi Fumiko present specific descriptions of various locales, often including travel from place to place. Fumiko herself spent her life traveling among a remarkable number of places, an experience strongly reflected in her works. Meanwhile, place as setting plays an important role in her works as well. The depiction of the land is highly significant, fulfilling the function of metaphor.
It is impossible, in Fumiko’s literature, to describe people without the land they are rooted in. Climate and local character make people who they are. A change in the land transforms everything we sense, from the landscape to the air, the food, and so on. We feel things differently on our skins, perceive different scents and flavors. Fumiko, who was highly attuned to these “physical sensations,” captured them to depict the people in each place she lived. Her propensity for travel was also intended to enable deep consideration and expression of humanity through “physical sensation.”
I have traveled various lands, and in the end I believe in the earth, I believe in the air, I believe in the moon, I believe in the earthly activity that generates mold. I think God pities any work done without faith, attempting to live on the shallow knowledge of humanity alone. (1)
As shown here, Fumiko was characterized as a writer by her depiction of the earth through its land and of earthly activities themselves. The land had actually become an object of faith for her.
She was particularly influenced by the terra incognita of foreign countries. Fumiko frequently wrote about foreign countries based on her own perceptions thereof; during the war, she traveled to China and Southeast Asia under the guise of following the army, expressing her ravenously acquired sense of the land as a writer.
After the war, as society and all its values changed, her writing transformed as well. Fumiko had been a popular writer sensitive to the needs of the time; she remained so throughout the turbulence of the postwar, still retaining her experience in Southeast Asia during the war, or more precisely, the physical sensations it had given her.
Ukigumo (Floating Clouds) (1951, Rokko Shuppan) is a distillation of all her work set in Southeast Asia. In this novel, she depicts the instinctive mutual attraction between a man and a woman, densely intertwined with depictions of Dalat in French Indochina. After the war, the passion of romantic love is lost to the lovers, who have left Dalat. In the final scene, as if seeking this lost passion, they travel to Yakushima, then the southernmost tip of Japan, on their way to Southeast Asia. The land of Southeast Asia thus plays an important role in delineating the characters of Ukigumo. Without Fumiko’s Southern experience, Ukigumo—which stands with Horoki (Diary of a Vagabond) among her major works—would never have been written. In that sense, Southeast Asia was a land that significantly affected Fumiko’s postwar work.
This paper confirms the influence and importance of Fumiko’s Southern experience in her postwar writing through an exegesis of the short story “Furui kaze, atarashii kaze,” which is partially set in Borneo.
2 On the text
Fumiko’s works are often roughly divided into those in her Complete Works and those not included therein. The term Complete Works here refers to the Complete Works of Hayashi Fumiko (Busendo, 1977), based on the edition published by Shinchosha from 1951 to 1953. This collection, which runs to sixteen volumes in total, actually omits enough pieces to suggest that Complete Works is not an appropriate title. However, it is not clear exactly what or how many works are not included. That is, we remain short of accurate information on how many pieces Fumiko wrote during and after the war and what they consist of. Researchers are working steadily to remedy this matter.
“Furui kaze, atarashii kaze” is not in the Complete Works; it was serialized in the magazine Shimpu over eight issues from October 1947 to May 1948. The entire text is available in the National Diet Library. The original manuscript is held at the Shinjuku Historical Museum, and was on display in the 2011 exhibition “Hayashi Fumiko Still Shines: Commemorating the 60th Anniversary of Her Death” at Kanagawa Museum of Modern Literature. Hirabayashi Toshihiko, the editor in charge of “Furui kaze, atarashii kaze,” saw the exhibition and reflected on the time the piece was written, focusing mainly on information about the magazine Shimpu, in “On Hayashi Fumiko.”(2) Thus, over a half-century after it was written, “Furui kaze, atarashii kaze” has come into the spotlight among researchers. This paper examines this story, almost unknown to the general public, to position it within Hayashi Fumiko’s body of work.
3 “Boring” Borneo
The places depicted in “Furui kaze, atarashii kaze” include “O City, by the sea in H Prefecture” (Onomichi), Tokyo, Borneo, and R in northern Shinshu. These all correspond to important places in Hayashi Fumiko’s real life. Onomichi, where she spent her student days. Tokyo, where she spent the rest of her life. Borneo, which she explored during the war while following the army as a writer. Shinshu, where she was evacuated near the end of the war. Among these very personal places, Borneo makes a particularly vivid impression in the story.
Fumiko also wrote about Borneo in “Borneo Diamond” (Kaizo, June 1946). Set in Banjarmasin, Borneo, during the war, “Borneo Diamond” depicts a Japanese woman, Tamae, who enters the sex trade working for Japanese men. The heroine’s lover Manabe is an employee of the “N Shokusan Company” who has been sent to Borneo on business, leaving his wife behind in Japan. “Furui kaze, atarashii kaze” also features an employee of the N Shokusan Company, Yoshitaka. He marries the heroine, Kazuko, upon being sent to Borneo, and they live together in Banjarmasin. However, she returns to Tokyo alone, leaving him there. These two stories depict men from the N Shokusan Company from both sides: “Borneo Diamond” from the mistress’s perspective, “Furui kaze, atarashii kaze” from the wife’s, as if flipping the structure around.
Kazuko, the heroine of “Furui kaze, atarashii kaze,” is a Tokyo-born graduate of Tsuda Women’s College who teaches English at a girls’ school in “O City, H Prefecture” (presumably Onomichi in Hiroshima). After a peripatetic early childhood, Hayashi Fumiko found herself in Onomichi for her elementary and girls’ high school years. “O City, H Prefecture,” where she spent six years or so, was the home of her youth. The story includes the character Harue, a student of Kazuko’s who longs to go to Tokyo after being unlucky in love; she is to some extent a projection of Fumiko’s younger self.
Having returned briefly from Onomichi to her family home in Tokyo, Kazuko is met with an unexpected proposal of marriage. While hesitating to some extent, she accepts the arranged marriage. Along with her new husband Yoshitaka, she sets off to Borneo. Here, their new life in the exotic atmosphere of Southeast Asia begins. As in the text (“Kazuko had no idea what kind of man he could be, but she was drawn to the sound of Borneo”), it seems that Kazuko decides to marry Yoshitaka because she wants to go to Borneo.
How, then, is Borneo—the object of her fascination—depicted in the text? Fumiko depicts the scenery of Borneo as she experienced it during her time in Southeast Asia, with the unique “physical sensations” specific to someone who has been there.
The boat’s gradual progress up the muddy waters of the Barito River and through the mangrove jungle filled Kazuko, travel-weary as she was, with the unbearable melancholy of journeys. Perhaps because she had come from a lively place into this primitive, lonely land, Kazuko felt as if she had come very much further than she had ever imagined. …
The Banjar days were boring. Is this the Borneo landscape I dreamed of? she wondered, sighing heavily within the white mosquito net where they slept, child at her breast.
In this tropical land, the smells, the sounds, the ennui ate away at her body, with hints of collapse already gnawing at her nerves. (3)
Borneo is “boring” enough to bring on “collapse.” The boredom of this land leads directly to Kazuko’s “lack of excitement” toward Yoshitaka. That is, the land of Borneo overlaps with Yoshitaka the man; depicting the land serves to express the atmosphere between Kazuko and Yoshitaka in their life together. For Kazuko at the time, it was nothing more or less than “boring,” but she reflects on it as follows after returning to Tokyo.
Suddenly, she found herself imagining Yoshitaka. Her time in Banjar, under the brilliant Borneo sun, now struck her with stinging nostalgia. She remembered his gaunt form, slumped in a white chair against the fan-like fronds of a traveler’s palm. (4)
Remembering Borneo is at the same time missing Yoshitaka, suggesting the connection between depicting the land and depicting people.
4 Namiko, child of Borneo
Amid the unbearable, “mind- and body-numbing” boredom of Borneo, Kazuko’s instincts constantly direct her toward something she is not getting from Yoshitaka, whether she is flirting subtly with Sauddin the driver or dreaming of Kanayama Noboru, an old colleague from her teaching days. We see Kazuko, in this situation, requesting a massage.
Bored, she called for a masseuse. Her youthful body was relentlessly in search of stimulation. The elderly masseuse stripped Kazuko naked and slicked her back with palm oil. Her fingertips drew swirls into Kazuko’s skin. Without a single word exchanged, the massage continued in silence. This body, face down on the big towel laid over the sheet—whose body was it? …
As the massage continued, Kazuko watched the profile of the child lying next to her, staring up at the ceiling. She thought wryly that the child was likely to grow up into a woman without feelings. (5)
Giving herself entirely over to the land of Borneo, feeling the land literally on her skin, Kazuko wonders who her body belongs to. By separating her consciousness from her body, considering it objectively as “someone’s,” she expresses the integration of her body and the land of Borneo. Kazuko’s body is that of Yoshitaka’s wife at the same time as it is melded with the land of Borneo itself. In her essay “A Writer’s Notebook,” Fumiko writes of Borneo as follows.
The brilliant natural workings of the tropics seemed like a real-world fairy tale. Rich in water, the ancient jungle was black with abundant growth. The various peoples living there were artless in their reproduction, just like butterflies or flowers … (6)
She adds “Nature and humans alike were at play, melting into one” (7). In other words, the activities of life in this land took place within the intimate connection between humanity and nature. In the scene above, Fumiko depicts the raw, vivid connection between the climate and the people. Born within this intimate connection of nature and humanity is the little girl sleeping next to Kazuko, Namiko. The baby’s name, which means “beautiful child of the South,” suggests that she has been born directly from Borneo and Kazuko’s body.
In “Borneo Diamond” there is also a scene in which the heroine Tamae summons a masseuse.
Tamae lay prone, naked within the white mosquito net. With both legs on a bolster like a long pillow, for all the world like a stretched-out frog, she let the Javanese masseuse have her way with her body. The masseuse set Tamae’s body agleam with palm oil and massaged her oil-wet back, as if writing spirals into it with her hard palms. Pressing her face into the big towel, Tamae thought of the child she had given up. (8)
Here once again the description of a child appears during the massage. In both works, the expression of full-body physical sensation leads in the end to the image of a child. However, in “Borneo Diamond,” Tamae is not even granted the chance to see the child she bore herself. Here, it is the diamond that takes the place of the child. Depicted on the one hand as bringing to mind “the soft skin of a woman,” it also evokes the child: “Once again, she gazed steadily at the diamond where the light fell on it. Suddenly, apropos of nothing, the face of her lost child came to her mind’s eye.” Mined from the land of Borneo, the diamond can be considered a symbol of what the land has birthed.
5 A man named Kanayama
Although Kazuko gives birth to Namiko in Borneo, the news of her mother’s death summons her back to Japan alone. The man she is in love with is, in fact, not her husband but her colleague from her teaching days in Onomichi, Kanayama Noboru. Kanayama, who has been “assigned to this countryside girls’ school two years out of art school with a weak chest,” is an art teacher popular among the students for his sensitivity and good looks. Along with the students, Kazuko and her colleague Akiko become fond of Kanayama as well. Kanayama himself, nothing loath in either case, takes the chance for covert encounters with each of them when returning to Tokyo.
After Kazuko marries Yoshitaka, Kanayama and Akiko marry. However, on Kazuko’s return to Japan from Borneo, she is met with a harsh reality: the outbreak of hostilities with America, the worsening war situation, and evacuation to “R in the mountains of northern Shinshu.” Living “an unbearable life, driven to the point just this side of suicide,” Kazuko awaits her husband Yoshitaka, who shows no signs of returning from Borneo. Her unease builds and builds.
Unexpectedly, at this point, Kanayama appears once again. Having lost his wife Akiko to acute pneumonia while teaching at a girls’ school in Manchuria, Kanayama has come to see Kazuko “as if drawn by a winding thread.” Kanayama’s experience of his reunion with Kazuko, sitting at the kotatsu, is as follows.
Kanayama felt his kneecaps finally grow warm. Soothed by the warmth in his knees, he thought dreamily that people can always react with natural change in response to their environment. He was tired of complex issues. Simply having come to visit Kazuko, with no deeper thoughts in mind than adoration for her, filled him with a cozy warmth. (9)
The natural instinct of people who “can always react with natural change in response to their environment” is depicted through Kanayama. Having lost Akiko, he has come to see Kazuko in accordance with his desire for life. Regardless of propriety, common sense, or “complex issues,” Kanayama’s survival instinct has driven him to seek her out. No matter how their environments, locations, values, or society may change, people must live on, and seem to be possessed of an instinct to get used to things. Kanayama’s fate is to grow accustomed to the worsening war situation and to the changing environment occasioned by the grand-scale postwar reforms in values and society.
His fate is that borne by many Japanese of the time. Tomioka Kengo of Ukigumo likewise wanders from the bosom of one woman to the next as his survival instinct drives him, unfettered by propriety, common sense, or even morals or ethics. It has been pointed out that the characters used in his name, Kengo, imply that he “includes (ken) the self (go)” of the individual Japanese. (10) Kanayama of “Furui kaze, atarashii kaze” is perhaps a character showing Tomioka at an earlier stage of development. Kanayama and Tomioka are very much the image of the Japanese that Fumiko, having experienced the war and its aftermath, sought to depict.
Incidentally, “Furui kaze, atarashii kaze” records Kanayama and Kazuko’s first relations as follows.
Their breathing told the whole story. There was no need to say a word.
Kazuko buried her face in the man’s coarse hair brushing her cheek. She felt a raw sexual joy in its touch and scent, as if she could bury her whole life there without regrets. (11)
Kazuko is already incapable of removing herself from Kanayama’s touch and scent. Here, the story gives us a hint of male and female instincts. Ukigumo also contains a scene where Yukiko is drawn to the smell of Tomioka’s body, describing the connection of a man and woman beyond the reach of reason. Men must become used to any environment at all in their lives, without recourse to morals, ethics, or pride. Women must live by a sensibility beyond reason or intellect. These are the characteristics of the people depicted by Fumiko. In her stories, these people are set free to lead their lives in a variety of places. Through them, Fumiko attempted to grasp the truth of humanity.
6 The nameless baby
Yoshitaka dies in the war, and Kazuko’s new life with Kanayama begins. As their relationship is disrupted by Harue, the former girls’ school student, Kazuko prepares to bear Kanayama’s child. For all she is desperate to abort the child, a healthy boy is finally born.
The child’s dark-red face bore Kanayama’s features to the life, giving Kazuko a mystical feeling. Namiko looked like Yoshitaka, while this baby looked like Kanayama… Kazuko felt a secret smile tug at her lips, thinking of the children born with each of her partners’ faces. (12)
The two children born of Kazuko—Yoshitaka’s child in Borneo during the war, and Kanayama’s child in Tokyo after the war—both have “her partners’ faces.” We must take this to mean not simply that each child resembles its father, but that each bears the characteristics and desires of the land where it was born. The children symbolize the lands where they were born. Kazuko feels “a secret smile” tug at her when she thinks of the children. The word “secret” is important here. Until this point, Kazuko has been longing to abort Kanayama’s child. While born after long internal struggle, this inevitable natural principle, beyond her own will or wishing, brings out a “smile” in her in spite of herself.
Elsewhere, there is a scene where Kazuko and Kanayama observe the newborn child, each with different feelings.
Kazuko regrets over and over that she has not somehow gotten rid of the child in the womb. This unwelcome child has come healthy to birth, a little living thing which Kanayama is now regarding with satisfaction. As for Kanayama, he feels an inner happiness like sunshine. (13)
If we consider the child to symbolize Japan and Tokyo after defeat in the war, the differences between Kazuko’s hesitation in the face of a new world and Kanayama’s feelings, “always able to react with natural change in response to [his] environment” become evident. Kanayama rejoices above all at the birth of the child. Half aware of him, Kazuko, still torn, can “do nothing to stop herself from suddenly bursting into tears.” How are we to interpret her tears? Relief, confusion, hope, resignation. The following text also indicates a blend of these feelings.
Kazuko realized how miserable she was, driven into a loneliness with no place to go. It was a different time. The old things had all been blown away on a faraway wind as the new era began, a newness that seemed to her useful only for leaving humanity winded and weathered. It was nothing like a progressive newness. It seemed to her to be nothing but the rounds of the sun, weathering away each day. … She also began to feel that men and women alike had lost an important point of some kind in their lives, for the sake of this long war. What could the point be? Forgetting what lay in their hearts, they were hollowed out, living and acting out each day as no more than bodies. (14)
What is the “important point of some kind” lost to Japanese in the postwar? It is the sense of hollowness, without knowing what used to fill that space, that renders Kazuko unable to “stop herself from suddenly bursting into tears.” Naturally, it is not only Kazuko who is afflicted with this hollowness. This nameless sense of “hollowness” is a problem forced upon Hayashi Fumiko, the author, as well as on us Japanese. We have lived through the postwar still hollow, achieving economic development and seizing on it as our identity. However, the hollowness remains unfilled, still looking us in the face seventy years after the war. The “important point of some kind” Fumiko describes in “Furui kaze, atarashii kaze” may well be a problem for us to consider today.
In this story, Kazuko and Kanayama’s child, the symbol of postwar Japan, remains nameless throughout. Compared to Namiko, the “beautiful child of the South” born in Borneo, there is deep significance in this nameless child of postwar Japan. As the “important point of some kind” remains unknown, perhaps we may never know the name of this child.
7 Longing for the South
Finally, let us examine the last scene of the story.
“Namiko is late…”
Kanayama took the hand towel hanging on the wall and wiped his hands.
“I wonder what name we should choose,”
he said loudly.
The baby, bathed and changed into new clothes, was passed from the midwife’s hands into Kanayama’s. It was surprisingly lightweight. So light he could hardly trust it was there. Unlike Namiko’s solid weight, the baby was soft and light in his hands. (15)
Namiko’s absence as shown here does incite a degree of uneasy imagination. The story’s middle part includes a scene where Yoshitaka’s mother, while insisting that she wants custody of her grandchild Namiko, takes her out for sweets in Shinjuku while the child is home alone. Imagination applied to the subsequent “Namiko’s solid weight” also suggests something dubious about Kanayama’s physical sensations. Having experienced the birth of his own child, Kanayama “wondered at the courage bubbling up, enabling him to take on any job, however plebeian, even as a broker.” It is possible to infer that for the sake of himself, Kazuko, and their newborn child, he has sacrificed Namiko in some way or form. “Both of them were at the end of their rope after six months of poverty eating away at them.” While Kazuko hopes to abort her child with Kanayama, it would not be so strange if Kanayama planned to offer up Namiko as a sacrifice.
The story thus ends with “Namiko,” the wartime child of the South, still absent. At the forefront is the baby born in Japan after the defeat, still nameless. With the loss of the solidly heavy Namiko hinted at, and the “lightweight” stranger thrust before their eyes, Kanayama and Kazuko must go on surviving.
Namiko’s fate can be freely conjectured according to various interpretations, as the story gives no clear explanation. In any case, the land of Southeast Asia was lost to Japan after its defeat, becoming only a memory for Fumiko as well. After the war, Fumiko described the lost land of the south in various works, as if to engrave there something precious. In Uzushio, she writes of the Javanese song “Bengawan Solo,” and her late masterpiece Ukigumo, as noted above, is set in Southeast Asia. An essay typical of her later years, “Yakushima kiko” (Shufu no Tomo, July 1950), includes the following text, showing her continued longing for Southeast Asia.
In today’s Japan, Yakushima is the farthest south of the islands and the border as well. When we have traveled around Tanegoshima and Yakushima comes into view, the coral reefs nearby will be dyed by a damply warm sea wind as well. While there is no splendid harbor, I am in search of nothing especially civilized; but I was certainly imagining something mystical as I traveled toward this island of the farthest south. During the war, I traveled to Borneo, Malaya, Sumatra, Java and so on. My heart races toward the outline of Yakushima, afloat in the same Japan Current, and I can hardly wait to arrive. (16)
The work also includes various remembrances of the scenery of Java, making it clear that during her sojourn in Yakushima, Fumiko’s mind was constantly possessed with memories of wartime Southeast Asia.
As noted above, this experience in Yakushima is connected to the final scene of Ukigumo; however, the protagonists, on their way to Yakushima, can hardly be said to have regained the once lost “land of the South.” The passionate days Tomioka and Yukiko shared in Dalat are not to be recreated in Yakushima. The ailing Yukiko ends her life in Yakushima, without ever becoming sure of Tomioka’s love. For Yukiko, this land would no longer be “a real-world fairy tale” where “nature and humans alike were at play, melting into one.” The “land of the South” seems to have become, for Fumiko in the postwar, a source of fierce yearning as well as something irretrievably lost.
The absence of “Namiko” in the last scene of “Furui kaze, atarashii kaze” can thus be read as a presentiment of this lost land of the South, an important theme in Fumiko’s literary work. In this sense as well, the uncollected story addressed in this paper, “Furui kaze, atarashii kaze,” while not widely known, can be positioned as an important text with deep connections to Fumiko’s masterpieces such as “Borneo Diamond” and Ukigumo.
Notes
(1) Hayashi Fumiko, “Sakka no techo” (A writer’s notebook), Hayashi Fumiko zenshu (Complete Works of Hayashi Fumiko), Vol. 6, April 1977, p. 43.
(2) Hirabayashi Toshihiko, “Hayashi Fumiko ni tsuite: 1948-nen Shimpu” (On Hayashi Fumiko: Shimpu 1948), Gendai Shi Techo (Notebook of Modern Poetry) Vol. 57 No. 4, April 2014
(3) Hayashi Fumiko, “Furui kaze, atarashii kaze” (Old wind, new wind) Shimpu, December 1947, pp. 9–10
(4) Ibid. (March 1948), p. 31
(5) Ibid. (December 1947), p. 10
(6) Hayashi, “Sakka no techo,” op. cit. p. 44
(7) Ibid.
(8) Hayashi, “Borneo Diamond,” Kaizo, June 1946, p. 102
(9) Hayashi, “Furui kaze, atarashii kaze,” op. cit., January 1948, pp. 55–56
(10) Shimizu Masashi, Hayashi Fumiko no bungaku: Ukigumo no sekai (The literature of Hayashi Fumiko: The world of Ukigumo) No. 1, December 2013, D Literature Research Association, p. 112
(11) Hayashi, “Furui kaze, atarashii kaze,” op. cit. p. 56
(12) Ibid., May 1948, p. 39
(13) Ibid.
(14) Ibid., p. 38
(15) Ibid., p. 39
(16) Hayashi Fumiko, “Yakushima kiko” (Travel in Yakushima), Hayashi Fumiko zenshu (Complete Works of Hayashi Fumiko) Vol. 16, p. 13
First published in Nihon Daigaku Geijutsu Gakubu Kiyo (Research in Arts, College of Art, Nihon University) Vol. 64, November 2016
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