The Imaginative World In Izumi Kyoka's Romantic Fiction

Izumi Kyoka is the outstanding representative Romantic writer, enjoying extremely high reputation in the history of Japanese Romantic literature. He kept writing through Meiji era, the Taisho period, Showa period till his last stage of life, leaving behind him more than 300 works, including fiction, drama, travel notes and essays. Izumi Kyoka established his fame among his peers by his novels Night Watchman(Yakōjunsa 1895)and The Operating Room (Gekashitsu 1895) and was well-known as a"conception writer"thereafter. But his writing style changed with time passing by, however, from fresh and Romantic autobiographic writing to mystic and queer novels which marked the perfection of his writing. From"conceptual fiction", autobiographic novels to imaginative writings, the one which can reveal his talent most was the imaginative writings, where he created a fictional world with his mastery language skill. The research of Izumi Kyoka's fictional world from his Romantic novels is aiming at discovering the essence of his Romantic writings. Since there is not much study of him in China, it is of much significance for both Chinese scholars and the reception of Izumi Kyoka in China.There have no special books contributed to the study of Izumi Kyoka so far in China except seven relevant journal articles. However, the study of Izumi Kyoka in Japan reached its peak in 1970s. On the study of the works of those following writers, (such as Muramatsu Sadataka, Mita Hideaki, Kasahara Nobuo, Waki Akiko, Yoshimura Hiroto, Matsuhara Juniti, Hujimoto Tokumei, Kobayashi Teruya, Hirai Shusei, Fujisawa Hideyuki, Yamada Yusaku, etc.) the author of this dissertation, with the texts as the focus, attempts to make the research from different angles and approaches in order to reveal the essence of Izmui Kyoka's imaginative world in his writng as a whole. The author is going to adopt the comparative method to highlight the writing's uniqueness; in addition, she will use different approaches such as culturology( for exploring its source), text-analysis(for interpreting its theme), narratology (for analyzing its structure), stylistics (for revealing the poetic beauty) and statistics (for explaining its images), etc.When the European literary movement swept across Japanese society and Japanese naturalism dominated the literary circle, Izumi Kyoka entered Japanese literature with his"anti-modernism", clang to the traditional Japanese literature as a protest against"flat descriptive"naturalism. He inherited the traditional art and modern art in particular, thus created a unique world of vision. His Romantic world was built on his pursuit of beauty, unbinding imagination, acute sensitivity, superb narration and distinctive style.Izumi Kyoka gained popularity and established his fame for his"conceptual fiction"in the history of Japanese literature. But what can reveal the true characteristics of Izumi Kyoka's literary world is his later works, mysterious, romantic, represented by The Holy Man of Mount Koya. The group of works mark Izumi Kyoka's mature literary period, known for their strong aestheticism, mastery narratological structure, poetic language and narration, colorful description and witty dialogues. The different taste, elegant style, fantastic situation, expressive language, vivid description of background and atmosphere, all these contribute to the poetic feature of the writing, which is unprecedented not only in Meiji Period but also in the whole Japanese literary history. Those works by Izumi Kyoka can be classified as the most typical Romantic writings and Izumi Kyoka himself had been keeping such uniqueness throughout his life in his writing.The theme of woman, love and revolt ran through Izymi Kyoka's Romantic fiction from the beginning. In terms of time, the writing can be divided four phases: conceptual fiction, fresh and pure autobiography, eccentric and superstitious Romanticism, and aestheticism. As a whole, in Izumi Kyoka's works can be found"the highest principle of aesthetics", mystery and eccentricity, and poetic beauty in prose as well as traditional art .The fame of Izumi Kyoka's Romantic writing lies in the writer's acute sense and dynamic imagination. Izumi Kyoka, living in the Meijing Period, believed in the existence of Kuan Yin's magic and Devil's power. The facts that his mother died when he was young and he was brought up in a particular environment helped Izumi develop an imaginative character. His imagination was so rich to the extent he imagined that the spirits would show up in Tokyo downtown where the rings could be heard. However, the wring of other Japanese writers, following the counterparts of western literary movement, was inevitably coated with western flavor. In contrast, fully developing from his home literature, Izumi Kyoka's writing was found no trace of western influence. His imaginative literature was closely based on the traditional writing style and its peculiarity,but the European modern imaginative literature mostly was marked with the influence of recent development. Compared with the French and German imaginative writing, Izumi Kyoka's imaginative world kept close to the German writings in terms of traditional inheritance but far away from French Romantic writings which obviously shares some characters of modernism, but different from philosophically-swept German imaginative writing, which is filled with vagueness, obscurity, horror and morbidity, Izumi Kyoka's writing appears to be more transparent, emotional, pleasant and healthy.Izumi Kyoka's imagination was related to the classical and the folk literature. He borrowed from various forms of literature and art from Japanese pre-modernism which focused on talking and singing. They were mainly, Waka, Noh, Kusazōshi, Yomihon, folk tales, story telling, Rakugo, Bunraku, etc. For example, Izumi Kyoka transferred the Waka into images, transplanted the content, form, structure and even music from the Noh to his writing, adopted splendid color elements from Kusazōshi, folk stories from the sharebon, portrayal of costume, female faces close-up and humourous dialogue from the kokkeibon. He inherited the rhythm of story-telling by means of severn to five or five to seven syllabls Yomihon. From this, you can feel that his imagination was inspired by the folklore and its plot structure. The three images in his works, water, red and white color and the lantern, rendered the traditional Japanese belief as a nation and state of mind from the ancient time. Izumi Kyoka based his writing on the Japanese tradition, and thus guarded the clean"land"which linked the pure Japanese soul and the earthly world. To some extent, Izumi Kyoka is a real anti-modern writer.On the one hand, Izumi Kyoka took over the Japanese traditional literature; on the other hand, he went beyond what he had adopted. He did not merely follow the previous art mechanically, but improved it after careful and critical evaluation and assessment. Creatively, he succeeded in borrowing from the structure of Noh to novels. And then, he revised and developed a"frame structure"in his later writing, making it more flexible, complex and changeable. From time to time, he designed more"frame structures"or inserted such structure in the crossing or joint point of the story. Izumi Kyoka's sense of color came from the pictures in the preface of Kusazōshi and pictorial drawings, fresh and delicate, which is very different from the flat pictures of Ukiyo-e. The colors which Izumi Kyoka skillfully selected played a significant role in the plot design and atmosphere building. Moreover, Izumi Kyoka also filled his writing with a new element: movement effect. The movement effect refers to dynamic description and the rhythmic language. The perfect integration of color and movement effect can be found in Izumi Kyoka's description of a snake in his One Spring Afternoon. Izumi Kyoka's descriptive language is quite dynamic and rhythmic,and writing as such enlivened his use of colors as well.Izumi Kyoka's sense of rhythm originated from his childhood interest in the art of talking and singing such as story-telling, rakugo, Noh chants and seven-five or five-seven syllables rhythm from Yomihon. As far as language is concerned, the rhyme in his writing does not refer to five-seven or seven-five syllabic rhthm,but often it contains seven syllables and then five syllables and even it includes examples of seven-six or three-two syllabic rhthms. In addtion to the use of rhyme, Izumi Kyoka cut the long sentences into short, terse ones to make his writing more readable. At the same time, to enhance the rhythm, he made full use of onomatopoeia, parallelism, repetitions, all of which reveals a rhythmic style of story telling. The beauty of rhyme in Izumi Kyoka's writing was manifested not only through the language, but also through the rhythmic narrations. Sometimes the rhythm winded its way and slowed down in the narration, but on another occasions it sped up and it brought the narration to an abrupt halt, as if the music note hopped through the writing. As a result, the readers would feel many changing images approaching before their eyes frequently. In addition, the power of his language also lies in the unfinished sense of sentences by means of nouns ending, the splendid visual effect from the mixture of literary and vernacular Chinese diction, a large bulk of metaphor and similes, plus long sentences of rich imagesIzumi Kyoka is a genius. Though he never entered university, he opened a specific literary field in the Meiji Period by his talent and constant pursuit of beauty. He fought single-handedly in the westernized Japanese literature, guarding the territory of the traditional literature, carrying on, promoting the tradition of lyricism and story-telling. By this way, he sets up a pathway of dialogue again between pre-modern and modern literature. His unique and accurate style and splendid narration make him exceed the tradition and place him on the highest point of literary towers. Izumi Kyoka can be regarded as the unprecedented literary giant.