Water Imagery in the Work of Izumi KyōkaCharles Shirō Inouye

Excerpt

Izumi Kyōka 泉鏡花, 1873-1939, has been aptly described by Juliet Carpenter as a stylist and as an author of ‘perverse difficulty’. Donald Keene similarly holds that the difficulties of Kyōka’s style have kept the author from obtaining a large audience in recent years. He adds, however, that for the same reason Kyōka’s work partakes of ‘a mystery that transcends any particular place and time.’ His work was not particularly popular even in his own day, but it has, as Tanizaki predicted one year after Kyōka’s death, worn well.

We can enjoy Kyōka’s prose for its subtle rhythms and vivid imagery, but we cannot always understand why one scene follows another. Rich and involved, a Kyōka story often reads like a series of striking moments rather than a coherent work of art. Our inability to understand how such labyrinthine tales are formed poses a considerable problem, requiring us to search the fragmented surface of style for whatever principles of form we can find. What follows is one key to reading Kyōka: knowing how he apprehends imagery and how imagery, as much as plot or characterization, gives structure to his work.