The Wild Geese

Ogai Mori
(1862-1922) stands in the foremost rank of modern Japanese novelists. His professional success as an army surgeon was outstripped by his even more brilliant ascent in the literary world of the Meiji and Taisho eras. His work is characterized by a strong humanistic element, a romantic quality effectively tempered by realism, and a lucid style that often rises to lyric intensity, as in the closing passages of
The Wild Geese
.

Published by Tuttle Publishing, an imprint of Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd., with editorial offices at 364 Innovation Drive, North Clarendon, Vermont 05759 U.S.A. and 61 Tai Seng Avenue, #02-12, Singapore 534167.

Copyright © 1959 Charles E. Tuttle Publishing Company Limited.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher.

LCC Card No. 59-14087
ISBN 978-4-8053-0884-4
First edition, 1959

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MORE THAN half a century ago the author of
The Wild Geese
recognized the difficulty of solving one of Japan's major problems, the adoption of Western values and the preservation of her own. He lived at a time when Japan was becoming increasingly aware of external influences; he was to reflect those influences in his career as a major figure in modern Japanese literature.

In 1870, the third year of Emperor Meiji's reign, the precocious Rintaro Mori (1862–1922), who was later to adopt the pen name Ogai Mori, was learning Dutch, a language regarded at that time as indispensable to a knowledge of Western medicine. The tutor was Ogai's father, a physician to a feudal lord. That study of language started Ogai on a lifelong interest in the West. His father took him to Tokyo in 1872 to learn German at a private school, and two years later the boy of twelve, recording his age as fourteen, entered the preparatory course of Tokyo Medical College, soon to become the Medical Faculty of Tokyo University. For a period of time at the end of his college career, Ogai lived in the Kamijo, the boarding house frequently mentioned in
The Wild Geese
.

Graduating at nineteen, Ogai assisted his father for several months in his practice and then decided to become an army surgeon. In 1884 the army sent Ogai to Germany to study military hygiene. During his four-year
stay, successively at the Universities of Leipzig, Munich, and Berlin, he wrote and published several theses in German which undoubtedly strengthened his understanding of the scientific method and perhaps helped him form the basis for the logical structure of his later works of fiction.

His travels abroad had profound effects, for the year after Ogai's return to Japan in 1888, he translated and published an anthology of French and German poems, and at one time or another during his career he brought to Japan's literary public selections from Hans Christian Andersen, Goethe, Ibsen, Wilde, Shakespeare, and many other European novelists and dramatists. Except for an unsuccessful first marriage that ended in divorce, all seemed to be going well with Ogai. He established himself as an important writer, received an advanced degree in medicine, and earned promotions as Director of the Military Medical College and as Chief of the Medical Staff to the Imperial Guard Division.

Then, in 1899, Ogai was transferred to an army medical post in Kyushu. The change, a radical one in which his creative activity declined, made him think of his tour of duty as a period of exile. “The writer Ogai,” he wrote, “died there.” But the military man served without complaint. Perhaps the Kyushu period had its positive aspect in helping Ogai define “resignation,” a key word in his vocabulary and one especially important in
The Wild Geese
. To Ogai, the word means serenity of mind which enables one to calmly observe the world and one's self. The three-year “exile” undoubtedly gave Ogai time for
introspection, but a more active life awaited him when, in 1902, he returned to Tokyo to assume other duties and then, two years later, when he served at the front during the Russo-Japanese War. Yet he was shortly to figure as a leading writer standing against a growing tendency—one, ironically enough, that originated in Europe.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, often called the period of naturalism in modern Japanese literature, Zola and Maupassant were models for young Japanese writers who exploited the sordid both in society and in their own private lives. One might have expected Ogai to join the new school, but along with the gifted writer Soseki Natsume (1867–1916), Ogai objected to the subordinate role of reason, of intelligence, in the deterministic philosophy of the naturalists. Natsume stimulated Ogai to further creativity, and in 1909 Ogai began his own literary journal,
The Pleiades
. In three years, in addition to essays and translations, he wrote no fewer than thirty stories and plays, of which two major works,
Vita Sexualis
and
A Youth
, present markedly Ogai's criticism of naturalism.

Ogai's antagonism toward this new movement perhaps deepened his recognition of the richness of his own culture. Born into a samurai family, raised from early childhood in Confucian and feudal culture, Ogai, who began the study of Chinese classics at the age of four, had no particular reason to revolt against tradition. At an early age he had been given the opportunity to investigate the West. The new might have easily overwhelmed him. His return from abroad found him sensitively alert to the
powerful influences of the West. His natural perspicacity, his linguistic proficiency, his serious intellectual pursuits in Germany—all these contributed to his understanding. Yet, unlike many of those who had been to Europe, he was not content to be simply a retailer of new knowledge. With new thoughts assimilated into the complex of his own personality, he tried to awaken and enlighten his backward country. He saw the chaos in Japan, the chaos of the old and new in collision everywhere, and he attempted, through science and literature, to give his country the harmony, the order, it needed.

Earlier he had written stories of contemporary life; in the last decade of his career he was to shift his focus to stories of the past. In 1912, on the funeral day of the great Emperor whose reign was characterized by the adoption of things Western, Ogai completed the first of his historical novels. He concentrated on little-known personalities, men and women who subordinated personal interest to some transcendent cause, one they obeyed humbly.

Gan
or
The Wild Geese
, a long story first published in twelve issues (1911–1913) of
The Pleiades
,
focuses on a usurer and his wife, a poor old man and his daughter, a student and a mistress. Duty seems to submerge the individual soul, symbolically represented by the unrestrained flock of birds. But not all wild geese can fly, and in Ogai's novel there are several that cannot.

For the Japanese concerned with the traditions of his own culture,
The Wild Geese
recaptures the earlier Tokyo, the old Edo in the beginning decades of Meiji.
But even Western readers will appreciate the detailed route of Okada's walks, the environs of the old Tokyo University, the lonely slope called Muenzaka. Ogai records the activities of university students, their boarding house lives, their bookstore browsing, their moments of escape. Storekeepers, strolling performers, servants, geisha, policemen—Ogai gives his readers glimpses of these, genre paintings of nineteenth-century Japan, portraits past and even present.

For Ogai that external world is important; its psychological counterpart is equally so. Ogai watches his main characters, orders their movements, records their problems. His line of reasoning goes ahead, falls back, remains suspended in mid-air: what to say to one's daughter, when to repay an obligation, how to guard one's thought. This inner world struggles with the questions of silence and communication, duty and freedom, restraint and compulsion. Ogai's vision is unmistakably Japanese; on the other hand, the problems of the expected and unanticipated, of tradition and emancipation, of pattern and change, concern men everywhere.

The eyes of Ogai Mori are gifted ones. They observe, sometimes with affection, sometimes with irony, but always accurately. And the main impression they leave behind is that of the writer's sensitive compassion for man. That no simple answers emerge in the narrative, that no problems are solved, that the story comes full circle on the wings of dilemma, that more is implied than stated, that the novel's “uneventfulness” is nevertheless
part of a world of tension and conflict—these are major elements in the art with which Ogai Mori accomplished this mature work.