Even nations that share the same language often experience difficulty understanding one another's sense of humour. To many Americans British humour is unfathomable. The problem does not only concern language, but also the system of values and assumptions that every nation takes for granted. Thus it came as a big surprise to me to find here in Japan a translation of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Carroll's quintessentially English humour relies to a great extent on word-play, such as puns and syntacical jokes, which by their very nature defy translation. Yet in spite of the Japanese version's inability to fully convey the nuances of the original, it has nevertheless proved very popular with the Japanese public who are generally well acquainted with Alice and her adventures underground.
What interests me is how far can humour be international? Even though word-play, an essential part of humour, is elusive for foreigners to grasp, there are certainly other forms of humour that can cross the cultural divide. In this paper it is my intention to look at what elements of humour can be found in common between the works of Lewis Carroll and Miyazawa Kenji ( here his name is given in the Japanese way, family name first). Before going any further, perhaps it would be best to give a brief outline of the two authors' lives, to present them, so to speak, in their historical context.
Halfway around the world and two years before Dodgson's death, Miyazawa Kenji was born in Hanamaki, a small town in the Northern Japanese province of lwate. The eldest son of the town's pawnbroker, one of the wealthiest men in an otherwise very poor region, Kenji was expected to take over the family business. However young Kenji became very religious and, disgusted with the parasitical nature of his father's work, left home for Tokyo where he wrote the main bulk of the children's stories that are his legacy today. (In addition to these, he also wrote poetry but for the purposes of this essay, I will confine myself to his stories).
Before his death in 1933, Kenji did many different jobs, including being a high school teacher, an assistant at a printing works, a farmer, an organizer of a cultural centre for peasant farmers, an adviser on fertilizer to farmers and finally a travelling salesman. It may come as a surprise to Japanese readers of this paper that I am wholly interested in Kenji's children stories and not in his poetry. For in Japan, it is perhaps for the latter that he is best known. His fame as a poet can be attributed to a single poem. Opening with the phrases 'neither yielding to rain / nor yielding to wind / yielding neither to / snow or to summer heat,' (1) it desribes in simple, moving words the poet's wishes to do good for others while remaining humble and obscure himself. This poem is required reading for all junior high school students in Japan, and is included in their textbooks laid down by the government. It is no doubt what politicians would regard as 'wholesome' Iiterature but personally I prefer humour over lofty sentiment.
In some (but by no means all) of Kenji's stories there is satire, nonsense and a topsy-turviness that brings to mind Alice' s adventures. Let us now look at the similarities between Kenji's and Carroll's work.
The important point here is Humpty Dumpty's final comment: "The question is which is to be master." Instead of individuals being bound to use words as the dictionary and grammar books say, now it is the individual who has free rein. Of course, communication can only break down and splinter when this linguistic anarchy takes place, but therein lies the charm of this nonsensical world. We are liberated from a constricting view of language and are entertained as Alice struggles in vain to come to terms with her confusing surroundings . She is no longer the one in control (the master / mistress), it is the characters in her dream that have the power. They order her about, telling her what she can and cannot do, threaten her with beheading if she misbehaves and speak a form of English she finds impossible to understand.
In Kenji's story Saru no koshi kake, the same narrative structure and the same basic ingredients can be found. The hero, Narao, a young boy of much the same age as Alice, falls asleep underneath the branches of a chestnut tree. Whereas Alice finds herself falling down into a rabbit hole, Narao is invited to enter into the chestnut tree by three tiny monkeys who bid him to climb up the inside of the trunk using the little ladders provided. The spatial dislocation (with Alice falling down, and Narao climbing up) is the necessary introduction bringing them into their dreamworlds where they are then at the mercy of myriad small animals. As Humpty Dumpty said, the question is which is to be the master. Narao towers over his three new companions and could squash them with minimal effort. He gets angry at first when one of the monkeys does not use a polite enough level of Japanese when addressing him. Yet in spite of the size advantage he has, it soon becomes obvious that he is being hoodwinked by the monkeys. They use language not in a nonsensical way, but they use it nonetheless to get Narao to do what they want him to do. As in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland the story proper begins once the spatial displacement has been achieved . Only once Alice has reached the bottom of the rabbit hole do her adventures begin. Equally, it is only when Narao finally leaves the darkness of the tree-trunk that the story proper can begin. He suddenly finds himself in a grassy clearing in a forest, surrounded by hordes of miniscule monkeys who tie him up, throw him up into the air and watch him fall back down to earth.
Kenji's story contains elements that remind us of Gulliver in Lilliput. The humour is generated by allowing the hero to be overwhelmed by a foe so much smaller than himself. The reader is invited to enjoy the disconfort of the main protagonist and this schadenfreude is very much an integral part of all children's literature . But whereas in other authors' work this cruelty is often overplayed (as in the works of Roahl Dahl, for example), in Carroll and Kenji's stories, the violence is never allowed to get out of hand. Though Alice feels threatened by the chaos around her, in fact nothing untoward ever comes to pass. Likewise Narao, at the moment of his fall to earth. is rescued by a yama-otoko (a woodsman usually portrayed in Japanese folklore as having special powers) who catches him and lays him to rest on the ground.
In another of Kenji's stories The Restaurant of Many Orders (4) the question of who is master is again to the fore. Two city gents have come to do a spot of hunting in the mountains, all dressed up to the nines in the 'right gear'. After a fruitless search for game, they come across a restaurant in the middle of the forest and decide to make use of its facilities. However upon entering the restaurant, they soon find themselves no longer the hunter but the hunted. They are drawn into the interior of the building by a series of very polite signs that ask them to undress, to smear grease over their bodies and to sprinkle salt and pepper over one another. They are being prepared for the oven but are too stupid to realise this until it is almost too late. The humour comes not only from the reversal of their roles (from hunter to the game itself) but also from their naive willingness to follow all the signs' instructions to the letter without once considering what they might be letting themselves in for. Instead of questioning the absurd instructions they in fact find reasons to justify them.
The two gentlemen at last realise that 'The Restaurant of Many Orders' does not mean a place with a large menu, but rather a place that gives many orders (ie commands ). Like Narao being bossed about by his little monkeys and Alice being scolded by the Queen of Hearts, the two young men find themselves being ordered about, even if in a seemingly polite way. In both Kenji's and Carroll's work, this theme of mastery / subservience is clearly linked to language. The three tiny monkeys have no chance of overcoming Narao on their own so must use weedling words to get him to do what they want. Although in Carroll's work much of the humour derives from word-play pure and simple, there is also a rich vein of humour to be derived from the confusion Alice feels as she finds herself outwitted at every turn by the Hatter and the March Hare. In addition to this humour that springs from the reversal of roles with the human heroes / heroines finding themselves outwitted by their animal adversaries, there are two further types of humour that are common to both Carroll's and Kenji's work. One is satire and the other is nonsense. In the latter part of this essay it is my intention to focus on the two authors' use of satire .
In creating many if not all of the characters in his Alice stories, Charles Dodgson drew heavily upon people in his Oxford social circle whom Alice Liddell and her friends would have recognized at once. Of course it is not necessary for the reader to know which people Dodgson was lampooning to be able to share in the humour as the characters such as those already mentioned above are so well drawn they strike a chord in all of us wherever we may live (be it Britain, America or Japan). However, that said, many of his characters were based on real people and Dodgson, with a keen eye worthy of a political cartoonist, satirised the fish bowl atmosphere of the dons' social set.
One of the main elements of satire is to focus in on a character's most distinctive features and enlarge them out of all proportion . Hence in Carroll's work we find a cat that disappears leaving only its smile behind, the Hatter with his ridiculously large top hat, and a character who is such an egghead (British slang for someone who is very clever) he ends up assuming the shape of an egg.
In Kenji's work, this satirical touch is often to be found but as Kenji's life was spent far away from the eccentric peculiarities of English academia, the objects of his satire are, not surprisingly, different from those of Carroll. In the story The Restaurant of Many Orders, Kenji is clearly directing his aim at the affluent young men who have decided on a spot of hunting in the countryside . Kenji, a great lover of the rugged countryside of lwate, lampoons the yuppy types who regard the mountains as their playground. At the time Kenji wrote this story, Japan was undergoing a rapid process of Westernization, with many young men (including Kenji himself to a certain degree) eager to dress up in the latest Western clothes and show how modern they were. Let us look at the opening lines of the story.
Here we have two prime examples of dandified modern Japanese men, hopelessly out of their depth in an alien environment with little premonition of what lies in store for them. They are obsessed with appearance and doing everything in the 'right way'. Thus they have kitted themselves out with all the necessary equipment and they look the part. They have even taken the precaution of hiring a professional guide who can no doubt add that authentic touch to the day's proceedings. It does not take a particularly colossal leap of the imagination to recognize these two buffoons as the yuppies of a bygone era . They have little understanding of nature and see animals as merely objects there to satisfy their own whims.
They show no compassion when their dogs die, merely bragging to one another how much money they spent on the animals in the first place. They are excellent examples of the kind of urban professional who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Yet Kenji's satire was not only aimed at the crass young men of early twentieth-century Japan. He also wrote many stories poking fun at bureaucrats and their petty ways, surely a source of humour that can be defined as international. He was also keenly aware of his own petty vanities and in his story The Leather Trunk (7) he shows he is quite capable of turning his satirist's pen on himself (phrasing it like this, one might be forgiven for assuming he committed seppuku with his nib!).
In The Leather Trunk Kenji tells the story of Saito Heita. For anyone with even the slightest acquaintance with the facts of Kenji's own life, it is transparently clear that Saito is Kenji. Saito leaves his rural hometown for the big city and yet once there, he finds nothing but hardship and ridicule. In spite of this, he writes to his family telling them how successful he has become. 'I have so much paper money, I could wallpaper my room with it!' he enthuses in a letter home. However his family show next to no interest in him, realizing what a waster he is, until one day his father sends him a telegram: 'Your mother's ill. Come home at once.'
Unwilling to return home with his tail between his legs, he decides to buy a large leather trunk which he is sure will impress his family and convince them that his success story is in fact true. Having bought the trunk, he is faced with one small problem. He has nothing to put in it. He only has one suit and precious few belongings. In desperation, he entreats his boss to let him have the old architectural sketches and building plans he worked on and which are now of no practical use. These he crams into his heavy and cumbersome trunk which he then labouriously lugs home. As he is waiting for the ferryman to take him across the river to his father's house, a group of children crowd round, marvelling at the trunk. Yet what most interests them is not that it is a magnificent and expensive item but rather that it is made of pig's skin. They try and guess which part of the pig was used to make the trunk. "Look where it sticks out a bit there. That must have been the pig's knee!"
In spite of his efforts, Saito is either ridiculed or more often, totally ignored by those around him. He feels as if he doesn't even exist. Kenji himself had a difficult relationship with his father, who could not understand why Kenji ran off to Tokyo to write realms of children's stories no one was ever likely to read (it was only after Kenji's death that his work was discovered). Kenji was often overwhelmed with the feeling that his efforts were not only in vain (he published one volume of stories privately but was unable to sell many copies) but that they were also a symbol of his vanity. When he returned to Hanamaki from Tokyo, his sole belongings were a large leather trunk stuffed full of his unpublished work.
In this brief and sketchy essay, I have attempted to highlight areas of comedy and humour common to two writers from very different backgrounds, writing in two totally dissimilar languages. I hope to have showed that even though much is made of the cultural divide between East and West, there are points of reference that can bridge this divide and unite us in the altogether rather pleasurable business of sharing each other's jokes.