Romantic Literature and the Inner Life

English translation of the prose

AI-assisted English translation of the prose; quoted poems remain in Japanese. The Japanese original remains authoritative.

Originally published: 2024-04-10

This is material published on the Japanese website. Dates and notices describe circumstances at the time of its original publication.

Romantic Literature That Portrays the “Inner Life”

Seishu Hamano, Chairman of the Japan Romanticism Academia

1. Realist Literature Has Its Limits

Human beings do not spend their lives playing only the role of members of society.

At home, relationships between parents and children, and between husband and wife, await them. The troubles of youth, the anxieties of middle age and the grave problems of old age are not appropriately dealt with simply in one's capacity as a member of society. Afflictions of the heart run deep, extend through family ties, and bring back many problems from a past that cannot be erased. Naturally, these cannot simply be disposed of as social problems.

What occasioned the emergence of realist literature, and what did it give to human beings?

Looking back to the nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution transformed ways of life throughout the world. Growth and development brought changes in values: religious feeling weakened, and materially oriented, economic life emerged. Alongside this, extreme nationalism rose from the end of the century, and two world wars occurred.

War and the great advances of scientific civilization threw human society into turmoil. Across the world, the idea gained ground that realist literature should depict this upheaval; naturalism held sway, while Romanticism receded into the shadows. Writers and poets remained caught in the muddle of realist literature. Labor problems provided its basis; resistance literature and socialist literature guided people's minds, and even literature advocating revolution emerged.

Yet literature that did nothing but portray the corruption and injustice of human society gradually died out as worldly circumstances changed, until it came to be classified as a period in literary history.

At the same time—chronologically, from the late 1920s onward—an age of images and film arrived. Literature appeared that resembled historical records, for which images and displays of data would have sufficed. In the American writer Dos Passos's USA trilogy, newsreels and documentary writing were incorporated into literature. Realist works gave priority to describing changes in the outside world rather than entering the human interior.

As a result, political doctrines and religions operating through vast organizations began to dominate people's inner lives. The world grew ever more hollow, and humanity disappeared from literary works. Human beings became creatures tossed about amid material desires and change. It is difficult to say that realist literature satisfactorily illuminated the sorrow, passion, anger and remorse that dwell in and pass through the human heart.

2. Is Romantic Literature Concerned Only with Youth?

The word romance brings romantic thoughts to mind.

Being young, being in love, being full of affection.

Paying no attention to the world's contradictions, wishing only to see the person one loves.

Certainly, there may be such a stage of life, and there may also be the pain of disappointed love.

But adolescence does not last long. Once student days are over, people enter a stage in which they seek income and a stable, independent life. It is also the time when they first come to realize how little ability they possess. Through trial and error, they acquire many practical lessons and become more adept at living with each passing day. When those around them begin to marry, they too want to settle down. They seek the sense of stability secured by a reliable economic footing.

Even if that wish is fulfilled, illness may come, or discord with a husband or wife. Relationships with in-laws become complicated, and married life may sometimes be shaken in wholly unexpected ways, eventually ending in divorce or separation. Sad partings arrive.

People find themselves confronting the joys and sorrows of what we call middle age.

A company's bankruptcy may bring family life crashing down.

It is from around this time that Romantic literature begins to show its true worth.

Mothers and children, fathers and children, aged parents, accidents and illness—all become interwoven. Add changes of employment or residence, hospitalization, missed home-loan payments and so on, and agonies that cannot be confided to anyone enter daily life. Emotional entanglements grow complicated too; one may even reach a point of wanting to abandon everything.

Recording such things is the essence of literature, and I believe Romantic literature bears a share of that task.

In other words, the problems Romantic literature faces take on different colors according to generation and circumstances.

When the health taken for granted in youth is lost through years of accumulated fatigue, one also takes on questions that are difficult to resolve according to one's own judgment: how to support a wife, children and aged parents in the years ahead; an eldest daughter's marriage; or an eldest son's succession to the family home. Even when the inner life is rippling gently, intimations of approaching collapse or parting cross the mind, and one increasingly suffers under the word unhappiness.

Romantic literature records these many-layered, varied agonies.

3. Naturalism Expressed Genuine Romance

Naturalism, which replaced romance, was regarded as the beginning of realism, but it retained many elements of a Romantic character.

Take Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900). The love between a married man and Carrie, a girl from the country, leads them to flee together; eventually the man becomes a vagrant, while Carrie alone finds happiness. The novel portrays Carrie's selfish conduct critically. In the film, however, the two remain in love even as one succeeds and the other falls into destitution. It depicts their sorrow at length and moves the audience deeply.

In Japanese literature, 山本有三's 波 (Waves, 1923) is such a work. It portrays people as fate directs them. Many of the forces transforming their lives come from outside: a teacher and pupil meeting by chance, an unforeseen birth and a man from outside, heredity, separations and reunions. This is a typical form of naturalism, yet the characters' inner lives are profoundly deep and contain much that makes one think: yes, this is how life is.

4. Romantic Literature Portrays Life, Sexuality and Human Beings

The word romance brings romantic thoughts to mind.

But one need not be young. One need not be in love.

I simply want to portray human relationships rich in love and feeling, in which people approach one another with deep affection and trust.

The world today tends to be full of distrust.

Before any question of contradiction arises, someone in the habit of looking at others with distrust will suspect even their goodwill. In such relationships, one becomes a captive of one's own suspicions and cannot honestly accept another person's devotion. With age, people tend to become filled with suspicion; every kindness begins to look like a fraudulent act. Then no one seems worthy of trust, and before one knows it, one has fallen into loneliness. Loneliness is an environment one creates oneself.

Romantic literature has a warmth that dispels the loneliness creeping up on the individual.

With romance in the heart, one is happy.

There was once a beautiful woman in my world.

Had she lived on, might she now have reached the age expressed in the original as “御年桃歳”? With a gesture as though touching my heart with the pads of her slender fingers, she recited:

　　卆寿なれど我が血脈は確かなり
　　　　触れて詩を書く　浄土の春まで　秀

As I have said before, the learned head of Daigoji, 斎藤明道, was my teacher in tanka. But the author of this fine poem was also a teacher of my heart, someone I cannot forget for the rest of my life. Beneath the cherry blossoms, I once again recall the Romantic days of the past and join my palms in prayer.

April 5, 2024 (Reiwa 6)
Seishu

Translation note: The unusual age expression “御年桃歳” is retained from the Japanese rather than assigned an inferred numerical age. The quoted tanka remains in Japanese.