The Writings of Koda Aya, A Japanese Literary Daughter.

• Author: O'Brien, James

Koda Aya (1904-1990), the daughter of the well-known literary scholar and writer, Koda Rohan, has been virtually ignored by Western students of modern Japanese literature. According to the blurb accompanying the book under review, only one of her stories has been translated into English. (Tansman, it should be mentioned, has increased that number to five with a forty-page appendix of translations.) Reflecting this indifference to Aya among foreign students, the Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan, a reliable general source of information on modern Japanese writers, allots a skimpy, unsigned paragraph to her, while giving a generous column-and-a-half by a well-known scholar to her illustrious father.

In the standard view, Koda Aya was initially a memoirist for her father and eventually a diarist of her own life. She began her career by responding to publishers' requests for descriptions of her father's final days, requests that followed upon his death in 1947. Even after she escaped from the shadow of her father, Aya confined her writing mostly to aspects of her personal experience. Often the author's undeniable accomplishments are subsumed under general historical categories. It is said that her writing ignores abstract ideas and rational order to focus on everyday matters and to probe her state of mind; accordingly she is taken as a model of the "feminine" in modern Japanese letters.

Tansman argues that Aya is considerably more creative than she is normally given credit for. Whereas most introductions in English to a modern Japanese writer include a substantial biography, the author of this study emphasizes the artistic dimension and allows the biographical material to find its place in his account of the writer's maturation. This is not to imply that biography is slighted; the reader of Tansman's book learns a good deal about the life and activities of Koda Aya, but this material is brought in as part of the aforementioned explication. By its very arrangement, then, the book seems to protest the judgment that Aya is primarily a memoirist and diarist.

While Aya undoubtedly derived much of her material from her own life and that of her father, Tansman argues that she dealt with this material in highly creative ways. Her focus on the concrete and everyday turns objects into symbols of feeling. In a chapter entitled "A World of Objects," Tansman examines a vignette that epitomizes this aspect of Aya. Entitled "Hair," the vignette describes the...