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Herman Melville and Modern Japan: A Speculative Re-Interpretation of the Critical History

Serious Melville studies in Japan were initiated, during the 1930s, by the prolific critic, translator, and scholar of British literature, Abe Tomoji, whose subjects ranged from Lord Byron, Jane Austen, and the Brontës, to William Faulkner. His Herman Melville (1934) and his translation of MobyDick (1951) are regarded as his core achievements in introducing Western literature to Japan. Herman Melville is a small, tract-like book, published as one of a series of volumes intended to introduce Anglo-American writers to Japanese university students. In its prologue, Abe recalls the origins of his interest in Melville through an anecdote that links the advent of Japanese Melville studies with British modernism, introduced into Japan by Edmund Blunden, who, in a class at Tokyo University, according to Abe, “cited Shakespeare’s King Lear, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and Melville’s Moby-Dick, as the three best tragedies written in the English language.”1 The scholar of a literary genealogy descending from King Lear to Wuthering Heights to Moby-Dick, Blunden was likely conscious of the Nietzschean dichotomy between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, part of the modernist poetics that introduced Greek mythology into the literary paradigm of the age. Considering the modernist penchant for both extension and revision of received conceptions of tradition, one might say that, in applying “tragedy” to Moby-Dick, he was using the term as does D. H. Lawrence, for example, in such books as Apocalypse, to mean the loss of modern humanity’s contact with the cosmos, leading to our sense of a difference rather than identification with nature. Lawrence laments in the following words: “We have lost the cosmos, by coming out of responsive connection with it, and this is our chief tragedy.”2 Their use of the term “tragedy” and the introduction of Greek mythology and literature into modernism suggest anti-romantic impulses that attempt to