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The Samurai Ethos in Modern Japanese Literature

This course explores the samurai ethos in modern Japanese literature through exemplary works of three masters of the twentieth-century novel—Mori Ogai, Natsume Soseki, and Mishima Yukio. The samurai ethos, to a large extent, informed Japanese society throughout the twentieth century. While loyalty and courage are foundations of samurai morals, those qualities are inseparable from a samurai's readiness to die.

Both Mori and Soseki, writing in the early part of the century, were affected by the self-disembowelment (seppuku) of General Nogi Maresuke, who followed Emperor Meiji in death in 1912. After Nogi's death, Mori turned to the past, focusing on historical incidents from the Tokugawa Period (1603-1868), when Japan was ruled by the samurai class. Mishima, writing in the post-World War II era, was preoccupied with the samurai code of bushido, including loyalty (to the emperor), courage, and seppuku. In 1970 Mishima committed seppuku in protest against Japan's pacifistic constitution, which had stripped the emperor of his power.

While the samurai ethos informs much of the writing of Mori and Mishima, Soseki, in one of his most famous works, Kokoro, focuses on the ills of modernism in Japanese society, namely isolation and egotism—products of the rapid modernization following the demise of the samurai class. The deaths of the emperor and Nogi symbolized the end of that era of rapid modernization, during which Japan struggled, often in vain, to throw off the samurai ethos. "... loneliness is the price we have to pay for being born in this modern age, so full of freedom, independence, as well as their resulting loneliness," says the protagonist of Kokoro, who commits suicide upon hearing the news of Nogi's death.

Supplementing the selected writings of Mori, Soseki, and Mishima are scholarly articles on those writings, and literature and film on the history and ethos of the samurai class.

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Tues. June 10, Berkeley