Hermann Hesse and Japan

The work at hand

From the outset, beyond all the metrics and data which underpin the project, it became clear that a central aim of this book would be to explain why Japanese readers demonstrate such a great affinity with Hermann Hesse, and, equally, why that affinity was reciprocated to such a large degree by Hermann Hesse. How could it be that a European author’s reception in Japan starts early in the country’s modernity in 1909 and continues, over a century later, to the present day? Why is it that Hesse’s reception in Japan has been lengthier and deeper than it has been even in countries that neighbour Germany and Switzerland? And how has this reception process occurred, and who are the people facilitating this reception process? Finally, what is the mechanism behind the transcultural aspects of the reception process and how has a transcultural understanding been so emphatically achieved?

At the inception of the project, there were these basic questions and very little prior literature to draw upon regarding Hesse’s reciprocal ←8 | 9→reception of Japan. It very soon became clear that there was not one single answer or approach to the task at hand in view of the overall complexity of a reception process of a European author in an East Asian country. The project would require several approaches, ranging from investigating the clues in Hesse’s own works, scanning the vast amount of secondary materials available on Hesse in English and German, and all the secondary works that could be accessed in the Japanese language for clues to unravel and to start to make sense of the reception process. Reader-reception theory, world literature theory and a sociological approach seemed to offer answers as regards theoretical insights into how readers react to and activate texts and how texts might circulate the globe and be received in the literary fields of different cultures. Moreover, initial work led me along promising, new paths and helped to uncover primary materials in libraries and archives, which led to exciting discoveries about Hesse’s reception process in Japan. Interviews conducted with translators, publishers and students in Japan gave further valuable insights into the reception process and the current relevance of Hesse in Japan. Also, gradually, the realisation dawned that long-term sojourns in multiple cultural communities have helped to make sense of a project that spins threads between traditions and cultural spaces that span half the globe. Ultimately, this book may prise open the field of Hesse reception studies to include a detailed analysis of the linguistic and cultural community of Japan and provide a basis for other scholars to build upon. It also presents evidence and arguments that may impact Hesse studies. The research on Hesse’s reception of Japanese culture also shows that Hermann Hesse did achieve a new level of literary expression and spiritual insight after what is considered his magnum opus, Das Glasperlenspiel. The project may also shift our understanding of transcultural literary reception in a new direction, demonstrating particularly that, hitherto, far too little attention has been paid to unravelling the social ties and networks that explicate the agency unfolded in transcultural receptions in the literary and cultural fields of linguistic and cultural communities that differ from the original contextual community of the text.←9 | 10→

In this project, the term ‘reception’ denotes primarily Hermann Hesse’s literary reception in Japan, but also Hesse’s reception of interest in his work in Japan. A reception in a political nation, or better a linguistic and cultural space, is rooted, in this context, first and foremost in the materiality of a literary text – the received object. A reception, however, may also be multi-medial, that is, it is mediated in forms and combinations of forms other than literary texts. For example, Hermann Hesse’s watercolours have long been appreciated and exhibited throughout Japan. In 1998 and 1999, Hesse’s watercolour paintings travelled from Hiroshima Prefecture to the northernmost island of Hokkaido, via the Kintetsu Department Store in Tokyo, where the paintings were exhibited for two weeks in March 1999.²⁹ Twenty-five of the Hesse watercolours from the exhibition were selected for a parallel exhibition, Tabibito Kaerazu (A Traveller Never Returns), which brought together Hesse’s watercolours symbiotically with those painted by Japanese poet Junzaburo Nishiwaki.³⁰ More recently, Hesse’s writings on butterflies in his stories Jugendgedenken (Memories of Youth), and Das Nachtpfauenauge (The Emperor Moth),³¹ and in an anthology of Hesse’s writings on butterflies, edited by Volker Michels, Hermann Hesse: Schmetterlinge (Hermann Hesse: Butterflies),³² inspired the design and creation of an inter-medial Hermann Hesse butterfly exhibition in Japan in 2009, which, in 2010, then travelled back to Calw, Hesse’s ←10 | 11→birthplace,³³ on to the Hesse-Höri-Museum in Gaienhofen on Lake Constance in 2011, where Hesse resided between 1904 and 1912,³⁴ and, finally, in 2013, to Montagnola, where Hesse resided from 1919 until his death in 1962.³⁵ The exhibition continued to be shown at venues in Japan until April 2014.³⁶ The butterfly exhibition is an example of how a reception can cross genres in medial transpositions; in this case, from literary texts to a textually annotated Lepidoptera display, from the printed medium to the inter-medial exhibition of text, artwork, lighting and material butterfly specimens.³⁷ Classical theorist Lorna Hardwick points out that reception studies not only deliver understandings about the culture that receives the text but also equally about the originating contextual culture and the author, whereby recipient and sender communities may enter into in a rich dialogue with one another.³⁸ We can understand and term this process a ‘productive reception’. It is fluid and ongoing in outcome, and is influenced by all the actors involved in the interactive dialogue who shape the contemporary ‘reception’ in the receiving fields. For example, Chapter 3 focuses particularly on how Hesse’s work is received by actual Japanese readers (the receiving subjects), who also enter into an enriched epistolary dialogue with the author, in a process that may be termed a ‘productive reception’. In other words, the process of reception is dynamic rather than passive.³⁹←11 | 12→

‘Arguably, the Japanese understand me best of all, … and the Americans the least. But that is also not my world. I’ll never get there.’⁴⁰

This quotation is from Felix Lützkendorf’s 1972 recollections of a 1951 meeting with Hesse at his residence in Montagnola; a rural village high above the city of Lugano in Switzerland’s southern Italian-speaking canton Ticino, and Hesse’s home from 1919 until his death in 1962. On one side of Hesse’s study, reaching to the ceiling, were the bookshelves which housed Hesse’s personal library. Besides valuable first editions of books by authors of the Romantic tradition, the shelves carried a complete collection of translations of Hesse’s works into thirty-four different languages, of which, according to Lützkendorf, Hesse was most fond of the Japanese and Indian translations.⁴¹ Lützkendorf’s recollections are, of course, anecdotal and subject to the vagaries of time which affect a person’s memory. Further written documents, however, confirm that Hesse knew how his texts were being received in Japan. In a letter to American Germanist Theodore Ziolkowski in 1955, Hesse adds attributes to his productive reception in Japan, acknowledging that the process is dynamic: ‘I have many more and more diligent readers in Japan as in France, for instance, more readers in France than in England, etc. ←12 | 13→That can change with time.’⁴² Writing again in the same year (1955) in the form of a foreword to Germanist Kenji Takahashi’s Japanese translation of Hesse’s Gesammelte Schriften (Collected Writings), Hesse notes that, in regard to the reception of European science and culture in Japan, ‘We Europeans are continually surprised by the broadminded willingness with which our science, art and literature is received.’⁴³

In fact, we can go back earlier, to 1922, to find that Hesse wrote about Japan in his afterword to the anthology of stories from Japan he published that year: Geschichten aus Japan (Tales from Japan).⁴⁴ These stories were selected from A. B. Mitford’s Tales of Old Japan (1871) and J. G. Kohl’s German translation in 1875, Geschichten aus Alt-Japan. Hesse writes that, ‘The Japan of which these tales tell a story no longer exists’ and that the new Japan ‘had for decades accepted, without also changing its spiritual ←13 | 14→life, the external, technical culture of the West.’⁴⁵ Hesse’s fascination with pre-modern Japan is implicit in his statements, and he draws parallels between the inner convulsions he detects in both Japan and Germany as traditions and cultural certainties crumble and these societies seek spiritual re-orientation in the post-war world of the 1920s: ‘Today Japan is undergoing inner battles, in struggles for new, viable ideals, in struggles of adaptation, of inner dissolution, struggles that are no less severe than the similar struggles we have faced since the World War.’⁴⁶ For Hesse, the classic Japanese stories in this anthology are self-contained cultural vignettes of the past, fountains of enjoyment, with their own discrete spirituality and conditions of provenance and demise, rather than documents of a sterile historicity, ‘Treasuring beautiful, consummate cultural vignettes of the past, understanding their spirituality, recognizing the conditions under which they arose and disappeared – that is not a cult of history and hollow scholarliness, rather life-promoting pleasure.’⁴⁷ In sum, these statements document some elements of Hesse’s engagement with Japan. As the project unfolds in the chapters, we learn that Hesse’s engagement and dialogue with the culture and people of Japan went far deeper.

Theoretical considerations

Much theoretical work tries to understand how readers respond to literary texts and how meaning is created outside of scientific methodology. Martin Heidegger’s student Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) is generally acknowledged as being Europe’s preeminent thinker and writer on hermeneutics; that is, forms of interpretation and knowing outside of the scientific method. His most important work is Truth and Method, first published in 1960 as Wahrheit und Methode.⁴⁸ The core thesis of ←14 | 15→Gadamer’s hermeneutics is the historical perspective of our understanding. A person is a product of his or her own history and society, that is, the history and the society provide the ‘horizon’ of what he or she knows. Our interpretation of a text, according to Gadamer, is approached from these perspectives. A completely objective interpretation of a text in Gadamer’s thinking is impossible because of these varying perspectives. Moreover, readers cannot go back through time and approach the historical moment of the creation of a text with an ‘unmittelbares sympathetisches und kongeniales Verstehen’ (instant sympathetic and congenial understanding) as proposed by Schleiermacher;⁴⁹ rather the reader is subject to the effects of history, which have accumulated in the meantime, including the effects of the text being read, such as its contemporary reception process and previous interpretations of the text. In Gadamer’s thinking, a triangulation process takes place involving the historical context of the text, the cultural context of the writer and the historical and cultural situation of the contemporary reader. Gadamer terms these different perspectives ‘horizons’.⁵⁰ This idea suggests that an understanding, that is, a ‘fusion of horizons’ involving a text by Hesse and a Japanese reader, is unlikely or only partially possible because of the different historical and cultural traditions that operate. However, understanding (the creation of meaning) occurs very well among Japanese readers of Hesse’s texts, but not significantly under the terms Gadamer proposes. Gadamer says nothing about transcultural reception; rather his project is concerned with the connection between experience and logos within Western historical and philosophical traditions.

In the hermeneutical field of literary interpretation, Anglo-American reader-response criticism gradually shifted from an emphasis on the author and the text towards paying greater attention to the reader and his or her complex interiority. New Criticism, important particularly in the 1930s and 1940s, was epitomised by the ‘practical criticism’ of I. A. Richards.⁵¹ New Critics focused on the text in an act of ‘close reading’, that is, focusing ←15 | 16→on the words on the page, free from associations with history and context, elucidating the poetic elements of a text within a unified structure, and avoiding the authorial intentions of text production.⁵² Thus, in this approach, the objective existence of the text was prioritised and privileged. In the 1960s, in order to overcome the elimination of writer and reader from the analysis, there was a shift in literary theory towards reader-response criticism and reader-oriented theories.

Reader-oriented theories

One of the early proponents of a reader-oriented theory was Louise Rosenblatt. In Rosenblatt’s analysis,⁵³ if an author is well received it is because there is a correlation between the author’s intention (what the author perceives as the content or message conveyed by the words) and the reader’s intention (what the reader perceives as the content or message conveyed by the words).⁵⁴ This approach, however, is locked into ←16 | 17→a positivist method of understanding with a ‘causal link’ between the author’s intention and a ‘proper’ reading of the text and explication of meaning by the reader. A significant weakness in the approach is where meaning has to transcend the borders of European and East Asian linguistic and cultural spaces, most often as a translated text, disrupted from its original context.

In the 1970s, a literary theory research group was constituted at the University of Constance, known as the ‘The Constance School’. Two scholars stood out in this school in particular for their work on reception aesthetics: Hans Robert Jauss (1921–1997) and Wolfgang Iser (1926–2007).⁵⁵ Wolfgang Iser was primarily interested in the structure of texts and their potential effects. He was influenced by Polish philosopher Roman Ingarden (1893–1970), and, similar to Ingarden, Iser was interested in the microcosm of literary reception at the level of the text. In The Act of Reading, Wolfgang Iser posits that meaning is created, ‘As text and reader … merge into a single situation, the division between subject and object no longer applies, and it therefore follows that meaning is no longer an object to be defined, but is an effect to be experienced.’⁵⁶ Iser also takes up Ingarden’s work on ‘places of indeterminacy’ (Unbestimmtheiten) in the literary text by suggesting that in the communicatory situation, the text is able to influence the ‘dialogue’ by means of ‘blanks’ or ‘vacancies’ (Leerstellen).⁵⁷ The vacancies condition the reader’s view of themes in the ←17 | 18→text, but require ideational activity on the part of the reader, which eventually builds up and transforms the textual perspectives into the ‘aesthetic object’ of the text.⁵⁸ The ‘reader’ Iser posits is assumed to be reading the text in the same language as it is written in by the author. While in Japan many scholars and students have read Hesse in German, the majority of Japanese readers read Hesse in Japanese translation, and thus they interact with and activate a Japanese text in which the translator has already ‘filled in’ the ‘places of indeterminacy’ according to his or her understanding of the text and the respective translation style used.

Iser’s ideas are theoretical and a concrete method to test his notions of the reading act inter-subjectively has never been put forth. Thus, his proposals have drawn criticisms from various quarters. For instance, Bortolussi and Dixon point out the circulatory nature of Iser’s proposals regarding text and reader interaction: ‘From his theory of the text he extrapolates a concept of the reader and the reader’s presumed activities confirm his hypothesis regarding the text.’⁵⁹ However, Iser’s theory does contain seeds which are helpful in understanding a (Japanese) reader’s response to a literary text. For instance, Iser argues in Prospecting that, ‘If a literary text does something to its readers, it also simultaneously reveals something about them. Thus literature turns into a divining rod, locating our dispositions, desires, inclinations, and eventually our overall make-up.’⁶⁰ This passage does two things. First, it allows us to observe the subtle shift away from the locus of the Iserian ‘halfway position’, that is, a position between the text as an object and reader as a subject, towards the nature and interiority of the reader of the text. Secondly, Iser’s shift towards the interiority of the reader, which he does not develop further, points us towards Norman Holland’s psychological, reader-oriented approach to reader-response criticism.←18 | 19→

Reader-response theorist Norman Holland has turned to cognitive neuroscience as an explanatory tool for the reader’s reaction to a text. In his essay ‘Where is a Text?’ he argues that while the subject-object split, that is, the perceiving of objects ‘out there’, is essential for survival, thinking in this way can lead to confusion when considering a story or a poem.⁶¹ Holland cites cognitive linguist Gilles Fauconnier: ‘Our folk theory of language is that the meanings are contained directly in the words and their combinations, since that is all that we are ever consciously aware of. The effect (meaning) is attributed essentially to this visible cause (language).’⁶² Similarly, affects are thought to be located in text when we discuss how a poem or a story made us feel. This experience of language is illusionary because we experience meaning or perception in an instant through ‘complex intervening neural events’.⁶³ Consequently, for Holland, a reader’s interpretation of a text ‘is really a wholly internal affair, within the reader’s brain’ and thus the ‘reader cannot truly say things about “the” text “out there” in a world that is outside that reader’.⁶⁴

The ‘internalisation’ and the ‘cognitive turn’ in the field of reader-response criticism discussed above are reflected by Holland’s development of the notion of ‘identity themes’.⁶⁵ The underlying attribute of an ‘identity theme’ for Holland is the constancy with which it influences the individual’s life, and this constancy means that it colours new experiences and is very resistant to change so that we live our lives based on variations of an almost unchanging central identity theme.⁶⁶ The solidity of the identity theme rests upon the balance that suits a particular individual, which ←19 | 20→in a negative expression may mean that the individual even acquires ‘a symptom, an inhibition, or a neurosis’, but in a positive expression the individual develops ‘a successful balance of pleasure and unpleasure, defense and relaxation, through love or work (to mention the two great regions for healthy living)’, and once the balance is achieved the individual ‘tends to adhere to it.’⁶⁷ Beneath any one solution that an individual adopts, there is a ‘tenacious, general structure of drives and adaptations that changes, little, if at all, even under the greatest stresses.’⁶⁸ Thus, when interpreting literary texts, an individual deals with a text in the same way as he or she copes with life experiences: ‘The reader will filter a text through his characteristic patterns of defence, project onto it his characteristic fantasies, translate the experience into a socially acceptable form, and thus produce what we would call an interpretation.’⁶⁹

The new perspective Holland brings to reader-response theory is useful in that it surmises that our experience of literature cannot be simply thought of as ‘a discrete stimulus and a definable response’, or a ‘concretisation’ of ‘text schema’, but rather that, according to Holland, ‘each reader will bring all kinds of personal associations and experiences into the relationship between himself and the story’.⁷⁰ Jane Tompkins adds that the emphasis for understanding a literary reception falls on individual consciousness rather than structuralist ‘systems of intelligibility that operate through ←20 | 21→individuals’.⁷¹ Hesse himself lends credence to this approach. Writing to his eldest son Bruno in January 1928, Hesse puts forward his ideas about how an individual’s identity themes shape the response to a landscape, ‘When you paint Ticino with me and we both paint the same motif, each of us paints not so much the bit of landscape but rather our own love of nature, and, in front of the same motif, each person does something different, something unique.’⁷² In fact, Holland maintains that literature can most sensibly be studied ‘in some human being, the one who made it, the one who is experiencing it, the one who is talking about it.’⁷³

One criticism levelled at Holland is that his approach ignores the ‘introjects’ or internalisations of the alien elements encountered in a text.⁷⁴ However, Holland’s approach clearly sensitises us to the experiences and associations that individual Hesse readers draw upon in their text reading practices, which then influence the themes that individuals choose to write about in their correspondence with Hesse.