Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A lively view of Japanese history and the pain of prejudice, May 3, 1999
Shimazaki's life-like portrayal of a young man's struggle with prejudice and his own hypocrisy in Hakai create a delicate tension. Shimazaki's draws heavily on the sights, sounds and sense of natural things for his backdrop. Repeatedly I was reminded of the Japanese appreciation for nature as the main character, Ushimatsu hurried home to his father's funeral. Along the way, Shimazaki takes the time to describe the sky, the river waters and the flowering weeds growing beside the dirt road. Although it was his heavy use of nature that moved me, Okazaki was moved most by Shimazaki's depiction of humanity. "This spirit of religious self-examination extends through all of Shimazaki's works. This is Shimazaki's humanism rather than his naturalism." (p. 241) An additional strength to Hakai is the vivid detail Shimazaki uses in describing his main character's living quarters, the hard life of the drunkard's family, and the rigid caste system employed during that time. The reader has a full sense of being a member of the eta outcast group and a full sense of being a Japanese person in a complicated, striated social system. It simplifies these issues from a standpoint of historical study because instead of rote memorization of various levels of the community, literature allows the reader to mentally walk among the people, live with them and relate to them. The images created by his character bring such life to the community that it becomes easy to understand the structure. Even the simplest of scenes illuminates life in that time. This description of the funeral for Ushimatsu's father provides a vignette of life, religion and the relationship between people and nature: "The rough wooden coffin was draped in a white cloth, and before it stood a newly inscribed memorial tablet, offerings of water and sweets, and bunches of chrysanthemums and anise leaves." "Shimazaki Toson's Broken Commandment is another step in the right direction," Kojin says on page 76 before going on to explain that genbun itchi (written and spoken language as one) "was a literary form of the confession - confession as a system - that produced the interiority that confessed the 'true self.' " While it is certainly true the reader sees the world from the inside of the main character's mind in Hakai, Armando Martins Janeira compliments Shimazaki's humanistic approach in his book Japanese and Western Literature: A Comparative Study, page 129. "In 1906, Toson Shimazaki published the most significant novel of shinzenshugi (naturalism) literature, Hakai, about a young outcast who rebels against conventions which banish him from society." My only concern about Janeira's critique is that he credits Christians with giving Shimazaki and other Japanese Meiji era authors their insight to write against the social system. While I don't doubt that contact with external agencies helped bring new perspectives to Japan, I question whether anyone can accurately trace that origin to source. After making this questionable parallel on page 144, he pays a compliment to the author that I feel is absolutely correct. "Toson Shimazaki's Hakai is the first important novel inspired by deep humanist intention." I can't say whether it is the first, but it is deeply humanistic and inspiring because it holds such a valuable message that still has application today. Although humanism is a defining aspect of another novel from that time, Tsuchi (1910) ties humanism so tightly to naturalism that it is hard to say where humanity stops and nature takes over. Perhaps it is best defined by the author who links The Soil to the people: "Hardly a day passed in Oshina's life when she had not felt the soil beneath her feet. Barefooted except in icy winter, she had been its creature. And now, in death, she was it's creature still. Separated only by a thin layer of pine, her feet would rest on the soil forever." (Page 25) The power of Tsuchi lies in the reader's sense of the onerous tasks of daily existence as a poverty-stricken farmer in Meiji jidai Japan. I came to empathize with Kanji's hard work and failed attempts to improve his painfully meager existence as the years kept flowing past him and his life did not change for the better. At heart, he seemed to be such a genuine human and yet cursed by birth to be a Japanese farmer in the late 1880s. The complete poverty of his existence and the other farmers in his categroy described as mizunomi or water drinkers. His food seemed so scarce that he could not have afforded to subsist on much more than water. Both Tsuchi and Hakai give detailed descriptions of rural funerals during a similar time period. However, they differ in some interesting ways. "Ushimatsu's uncle, faithful to the old way of doing things, had provided for the journey to the next world a sunshade and a pair of straw sandles. A knife to ward off devils lay on the lid of the coffin. The praying and the beating of the drum began again, and talk of the dead man, punctuated by artless laughter and the clatter of dishes, was sad and at the same time lively," Shimazaki wrote in Hakai. (Page 138) In contrast, Oshina has no knife to ward off spirits, nor does the author mention any sunshade to cover her during her journey in the after world. Instead, she gets a shave. This difference may have been due to gender or to the difference in various regions at that time. "The acolyte lifted the lid of the casket, removed Oshina's hood, and stroked her cheeks with a razor. In as much as the hard life and hard labor of Tsuchi appears to have deeper roots in realism, the birth or rebirth of realism in Japanese literature took place in the late 1800s. Authors began to mimic the language of everyday use in their novels creating a direct form of literary realism.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A humanist, not a political novel, January 11, 2008
The burakumin, or eta as they are called in this book, a derogatory term no longer in polite use, are something that I have always struggled to understand. While the historical basis for the discrimination is easily explained, what with the taboo against working with the dead that was a foundation of ancient Japanese religion, why this problem persists unto the modern age has always been a bit mystifying. I know many perfectly reasonable, educated and modern Japanese people who find burakumin somewhat distasteful, although they can't put exactly into words why. "They are dirty" is the usual excuse, but even then it can't really be elaborated on. Old feelings die hard, even when the reasons for the feelings ended generations before anyone was even born.
With "The Broken Commandment", I was hoping for a little insight into the issue, a little understanding as to how this situation evolved, but this is unfortunately not the book for that. Originally published in 1906, the author Shimazaki Toson is not a burakumin himself, nor did he have any particular involvement with them. In fact, "The Broken Commandment" has continued to draw criticism from burakumin leaders as an exploitative work where the author used their suffering and pain in order to advance his career as a novelist. The book avoids any political or historical discussion of the discrimination, and doesn't really educate the reader regarding the burakumin.
What Toson did have, however, was empathy for the outcast, himself being somewhat alienated from society, and the ability to share this horrible sense of non-belonging with his readers. In that sense, this book isn't really about the burakumin, but about anyone with a secret shame that they must keep hidden. His protagonist Ushimatsu could have been gay, or of a different, shunned religion, or a member of any group that is/was considered distasteful to the general public. "The Broken Commandment" is not a political work, but instead a Humanist novel dealing with themes that can be found in any country, amongst any populous. It is, in fact, one of Japan's earliest Humanists works, and represents a distinct shift in Japanese literature during the Meiji era.
As a book itself, "The Broken Commandment" is not exactly breezy reading, but nor is it as heavy as the subject matter might lead you to believe. The first part is a bit sluggish, but the pace picks up later on, and towards the end, when the characters have been established and their various threads draw towards conclusion, it can be quite the page-turner. The ending is a little unsatisfying, but very atypical of a Japanese novel, which is interesting in and of itself. However, it is still not a Western ending, and maybe floats somewhere in-between.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
At its heart, a very modern novel, February 5, 2007
This novel, written 100 years ago, finds its place easily in modern literature. Its theme is authenticity: A real life and real happiness can only be achieved if someone recognizes, internally and externally, who he is. "Passing," which is the strategy advocated by the protagonist's father, necessarily inovolves a lack of authenticity and a lack of completeness. The only way to achieve wholeness is to "break the commandment."
This book is secondarily a social novel about discrimination against the "eta," a form of class prejudice that persists in Japan today.
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