What childhood was like in Meiji Tokyo

Desperate for more to read and having read through the pile of library books I'd checked out as the library was closing indefinitely behind me, I pulled a small book off my shelves that I'd been planning to read for a while, The Silver Spoon (Gin no Saji) by Naka Kansuke and translated by Etsuko Tarasaki. I believe I bought it when it was published and have had good intentions to read it ever since. It was published in 1976, which says something about my good intentions.

The back cover blurbs the novel as "A modern Japanese classic. The Silver Spoon is an extraordinary evocation of childhood and a memoir of the daily life, folk manners and children's games of pre-World War I Japan." By the book's internal evidence, Naka is evoking the Meiji-era Tokyo in the 1890s.

Naka Kansuke, (1885-1965) was born in Tokyo. Other than living in Hiratsuka (a city between Tokyo and Mt. Fuji) from 1926 to 1932 and evacuating to Shizuoka Prefecture during World War II, he spent most of his life in Tokyo. His father was a steward for the former feudal lord of Imao in Mino province (modern Gifu prefecture), who had a residence in the Kanda district. According to Wikipedia, Naka was one of the students taught by Natsume Sōseki at the University of Tokyo before Sōseki gave up teaching to write for the newspaper Asahi Shimbun. Sōseki arranged the serial publication in the paper of Naka's first novel, "a nostalgic depiction of his childhood and teens . . . The Silver Spoon. The novel is popular in Japan . . . replete with historical details as well as a contemporary sense of isolation; it follows Naka's psychological journey from childhood to adulthood."

I believe The Silver Spoon would be classified in Japan as a "shi-shosetsu"—an "I novel." There is only the narrowest gap between the narrator's account account in the book and the known facts about the author's life. In the West we would call it a memoir.

As the translator writes in her useful introduction, "The first part of The Silver Spoon consists of fifty-three short sections and deals with the preschool and early-school periods of the narrator's life. The second part, twenty-two sections, deals largely with his early adolescent years at school and ends when the youth reaches sixteen years of age." The past is truly another country, and Meiji-era Japan is perhaps more foreign than most. Here are two examples taken at random from the book:

—"One of my favorite amusements [at a neighborhood festival grounds] was watching the wrestling match between a man and a camel. A man wearing a twisted towel around his head and a fencing girdle would challenge the camel in the manner of an attacking bird, causing the angry beast to kick at him in response. Sometimes the camel lost, its neck pinned to the ground; at other times, the man, having been thoroughly kicked, ran away crying 'I surrender, I surrender!' . . . .

—"Nearby lived an old peddler of millet jelly who did some farming and local trading. When the weather was fine he came without fail, blowing a street vendor's flute as he pulled his wagon. The metallic, discordant sound of the pipe strangely stirred the children. Those in their houses came out; those who were playing stopped their games, some sheathing swords made of broken sticks while others pushed dirty spinning tops down the fronts of kimonos. All rushed clamoring to the wagon. Besides millet-jelly candy and other kids of sweets, the old man sold riddles. Everybody scrambled for these, turning over the red and blue papers to play the guessing games. . . . "

But while The Silver Spoon does describe scenes from childhood, it also shows the narrator at first "as as sickly, introverted child," writes Terasaki in her introduction. "He is often fretful and easily bursts into tears. This could be annoying and tiresome . . ." It certainly was for this reader. Bursting into tears seemed to be the only way the narrator could deal with disappointment, frustration, confusion—life's ordinary bruises. Terasaki notes that "small children, especially those who are sick are often given to weeping. but this trait is especially accepted by the Japanese people, for even as adults they are traditionally accustomed to expressing their emotions, both grief and joy, in tears when the occasion cals for it. Japanese literature is full of such instances." That may be true, but I am afraid it did not make The Silver Spoon less annoying and tiresome for all the pleasures it offers.