Recently I’ve been (re)reading a lot of short stories by Izumi Kyoka, who was an early 20th-century Japanese gothic writer. He’s been compared to Edgar Allan Poe, for the lushness of his writing, for his fixation with ghosts, demons, and monsters.
Kyoka Amongst Fascists
Izumi Kyoka isn’t that well-known today, but in his heyday he was one of the most prominent writers in Japan. He later witnessed his work fall out of fashion as Japanese literature abandoned fantasy in exchange for a genre of fiction that was more fitting to a fascist age: naturalism, the dry realism that sought to depict quotidian experience “precisely as it was.”* As Japanese society was becoming increasingly militaristic and oppressive, its fiction, too, left little room for freedom of imagination. Naturalist writer Tayama Katai described his ideal novel: “Everything must be candid, everything must be true to the facts, everything must be natural[.]”
This whole approach 1) was dry as bones and 2) relied on a set of assumptions that stigmatized anyone who thought outside of the box of objective, surface-level reality. Izumi Kyoka was an observant Buddhist who believed in ghosts. By writing about supernatural beings in a time when spirituality was being trampled on, he attracted the scorn of reviewers. One, for example, wrote: “Kyoka has departed from the correct path of the novel… In dragging in ghosts from the previous century, the author is a bit ill.”
You know what? Kyoka was ill—and a great writer. I’ll be talking more about his biography later, but it is true that he had a very different mindset from the other lauded writers of his era. When writing, he employed a technique he called mukou makase, literally “leaving it up to the other side.” The other side, in this case, was the spiritual world of the dead. About his own writing process, he said he listened while at his writing desk, and: “The smallest noises, such as the ringing of a bell, sound as if they are coming to me from another world.” These sounds would be immediately incorporated into his stories, which is how he explained the unpredictability of his own plots. (And if that doesn't make complete sense to you, well, it doesn't to me either. But all we really need to know is that he did his thing.)
Some Stuff I Like About Kyoka’s Work
The same critic who called Kyoka “ill” for writing about ghosts also complained that “[his characters’] ability to fall in love in one glance and then to murder at a moment’s notice are, like the circumstances in which we find them, never anything but strange.”
It’s (maybe) true that Kyoka didn’t focus on character development. He seemed more interested in the symbolism behind specific recurring objects—like mirrors, knives, and lanterns—than in the psychological profiling of imaginary humans. For example, rather than explain to us the inner motivation of his main characters, he might spend flowery paragraphs describing the vivid crimson of a kimono, or the exact way the moonlight was reflected in a pool of black water.
For me as a reader, character development is everything. And yet I love Kyoka’s stories. I’ve consumed them in Japanese (hard!), in English as beautifully translated by Charles Shiro Inouye, and in theater and film. I love them in every form, and characterization has never been one of my complaints.
I love the absolute drama of Kyoka’s stories. In “The Surgery Room,” a patient plunges a blade into her own heart because she’ll never get to be with her true love. Later we learn her true love is a guy she briefly glanced at nine years before.
Is this realistic? No. But the sheer intensity of her emotions is compelling. Rather than saying Kyoka’s characters are “undeveloped,” I would say they’re developed unrealistically. I don’t mean this pejoratively. It makes me want to examine how I would write if I didn’t feel constrained by the modern obsession with psychological realism. After all, lots of real people act in ways that I cannot explain or understand. What if I let my characters loose in a similar way?
Another example of how inexplicable behavior drives Kyoka’s stories: In “The Grass Labyrinth,” the main character is a young man who has been wandering for the last five years of his life in obsessive search of a song that his late mother sang to him when he was a boy. In his quest for the half-remembered tune, he has sacrificed everything else in his life.**
When we read stories like this, we don’t complain that it’s unrealistic for someone to ruin their own life searching for a lullaby. We understand that obsession is symbolic of more relatable things: grief, a yearning for childhood, Kyoka’s own mourning for the mother he lost when he was 9 years-old. These kinds of analyses shouldn’t reduce or oversimplify the stories, but they help me to understand why I don’t find the lack of psychological realism at all unsatisfying in Kyoka’s work.
“Kyoka” itself is a nom de plume bestowed on Izumi Kyotaro by his literary mentor. It means “flowers in a mirror,” which sums up his work well: beauty that is impossible to see directly; fantasies that combine to reveal a kind of truth.
Kyoka’s World
In the early 20th-century, when the future great writers of Japan were growing up, they found themselves despairing in the parched desert of naturalist novels. Kyoka, who insisted on writing increasingly freaky works as he got older and societal tolerance diminished, was an important and hopeful counterpoint for them. In Kyoka’s later years, his house was open to literary giants like Natsume Soseki and Akutagawa Ryunosuke, many of whom had loved Kyoka’s work when they were students, staying up late on school nights to read his ghost stories in secret.
Akutagawa coined the term “Kyoka no Sekai,” or Kyoka’s world, referring to the romantic, evocative images of Kyoka’s stories, all of which feel like they exist in the same alternative universe: Japan as it has never really been, the streets of Tokyo and villages of the countryside populated with monsters. “Kyoka no Sekai” also refers to the images Kyoka obsessively returned to again and again, his own set of symbols that you learn to decipher as you read his work.
What I love about stepping into Kyoka’s world is that he often frames his stories in familiar ways at first—a world that might be ours—and then that world unravels in increasingly supernatural disorder. Everything unspools into dream. In “A Quiet Obsession,” for example, a traveler discusses at length the exact quantity and quality of noodles he’s eaten for the past few days. It reads like a travel memoir—until it dissolves into nightmare after he stays at a haunted inn.
Kyoka’s stories often start like simple and fun-loving Victorian adventure novels: A Tokyo professor goes searching in the countryside for his academic colleague, an ethnographer who went missing while on sabbatical. What proceeds is, in the film adaptation of Demon Pond, two hours of the purest imagination.
His initial set-ups promise a kind of logic and realism that will not be delivered. Instead, Kyoka’s world shifts around you, becoming increasingly outrageous and dreamlike. I always happily anticipate the collapse of logic.
One more note on his world: His stories all feel linked, whether he wrote them when he was 20 or 60, but this wasn’t consciously planned. It was instead a gradual building of emotions, symbols, and archetypes that he felt urged to explore for often deeply personal reasons. He wrote to make living easier, and his stories are the solution he found with his own words. This is why the term “Kyoka no Sekai” feels so right to me.
A Final Word
This isn’t my final word on Kyoka. In the next part, I’ll be discussing more of his biography and how he kept writing in a world that wasn’t made for scared, fragile men with their heads in the clouds. Kyoka was a character himself.
Until then,
Hannah
Notes
*All quotes like these come from Charles Shiro Inouye’s biography of Izumi Kyoka, A Similitude of Blossoms
**“The Grass Labyrinth” has been well-received by audiences since it was written; it’s been adapted many times over the decades to theater, and was made into a 1979 art-house film that’s available on YouTube. If you watch the film—which has English subtitles—please know that it includes nudity, sexual violence, mentions of suicide, and explicit incest. I recommend it only for 18+.