The Sea as Metaphor: An Aspect of the Modern Japanese Novel

Zusammenfassung

Despite the fact that Japan is an island nation, surprisingly the sea has not played an especially prominent role in its literature. Although of course the sea does figure in many early poems, legends, and stories, and in the three major poetic anthologies of the eighth, early tenth, and early thirteenth centuries respectively, the number of such poems and stories relating to the sea represents only a small fraction of those relating to the many features of the land and to man’s activities on it — especially in the Heian period, from the late eighth to the late twelfth century, to the activities of the small court aristocracy, which produced the bulk of the literature. There are of course certain passages in the two great classics, The Tale of Genji from the Heian period, and The Tale of the Heike from the subsequent medieval period, which relate to the sea, but here too the number of such passages is much smaller than that of those relating to activities on the land. In the case of the Genji,we have a moving account of Genji in exile, at Suma on the seacoast, where his desolation and sense of forlornness coincide with the storms and winds over the sea, and in the Heike, we see the destruction of the Heike forces at the Battle of Dannoura, on the sea, which brings to an end their brief period of glory. Nevertheless, my initial statement still stands: the sea does not play a particularly prominent role in premodern Japanese literature.