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Report for International Lecture Series, November 26th, 2011

Speaker Katarzyna Sonnenberg
Jagiellonian University, Department of Japanese and Sinology
Theme Illusion and Enlightenment  - Management of Higuchi Ichiyo’s Literature
Date November 26th, 2011
Venue Josai University

When Higuchi Natsuko (1872-1896), later to be remembered as Ichiyō, first knocked on the door of Nakarai Tōsui’s house to ask him for guidance in writing,  no one at the time expected her to outshine the writer of popular stories serialized in “Asahi Newspaper”. However, a shy and self-conscious young woman blushing at Tōsui’s comments regarding her writing style and narrative techniques soon became “the true poet”, to use Mori Ōgai’s expression, of the Meiji literary world. Today, 115 years after Ichiyō’s death, her works are widely read and debated not only in Japan but also abroad and it is only due to her Diaries that her mentor Tōsui is not utterly forgotten. Ichiyō’s image is even present on the five thousand-yen bill, ironic as the fact may seem in the light of the poverty she had to endure during her lifetime.

My talk explores the appeal that Noh can have for people like me who come to it from outside its long tradition. In the first part, I reconstruct my own track record with Noh, both as an amateur learner, and as a student and then teacher of its history and aesthetics, with special mention of the drama theory of the seminal playwright and theorist, Zeami Motokiyo. In fact, a keyword from Zeami's theory is embedded in the title of this talk, the 'flower' (hana): that emergent something that blossoms between performers and audience when the chemistry of a performance is right. Hopefully the dynamics of the 'flower' may operate in the classroom as well.

While analysing the popularity of Ichiyō in and outside Japan I focus especially on the arbitrary relation between the writer’s life story, her experience and the literary fiction she created. I argue that contrary to many I-novel authors who entered the literary scene after her, Ichiyō used her experience only in order to convey the higher artistic concepts, in which she seems to incorporate Kobayashi Hideo’s ideal of the true work of art .