The Prose of Ashikaga Tokutomi
His prose is an exemplary depiction of nature and life, and has become a good teaching tool for educating the Japanese people about beauty. In Ashika's writing, the natural world, on which mankind depends for its livelihood, is always vibrant and full of vigor. The colorful dawn of Fuji, the sunset of the vast Sagami Beach, the strange and changeable flying clouds of Mt.
My family's wealth
One
The house is only thirty-three square feet, and the courtyard is only ten square feet.
People say it is both small and humble.
The house is ugly, but it can still accommodate the knees;
The courtyard is small, but you can also look up at the sky, walk in reverie, you can think very far, very far.
The God of the sun and the moon is always shining. All year round, wind, rain, frost and snow, take turns to patronize, the interest is not shallow.
Butterflies come here to dance, cicadas come here to chirp, birds come here to play, and autumn grasshoppers come here to murmur.
Quietly observing the greatness of the universe, most of its wealth is contained in this ten-square-foot courtyard.
Two
There is an old plum in the yard, and in spring and April, the tree is full of green and white flowers.
On a windy day, the plum blossoms fluttered down from the misty blue sky, and in a moment, snow flew all over the yard.
Neighboring family more flowers tree, flying flowers with the wind drifted to my yard, red rain fall, snow have, see the yard covered with flowers clothes.
Look closely at the peach blossoms, cherry blossoms, camellias, tangerine blossoms, and plum blossoms.
Three
There is a gardenia growing on the corner of the yard. In the dusk of May, when spring is cloudy, the white flowers are in full bloom and fragrant.
The master was silent and his wife rarely spoke. Such peanuts are most appropriate in my house.
Behind the old Li there is a sycamore, green trunk pavilion, never slanting out, seems to tell people: "to be like me generally upright."
The sycamore leaves and water basin next to the octagonal gold plate, broad leaves, with it, the sound of rain in my house.
The plums were ripe, and whenever the amber-like balls of amber, dusted with white powder, rolled to the ground in a bone-jarring fashion,
I thought how happy I would have been to have had a child to whom I picked one up and gave it to!
Four
After the mournful sound of the cicadas, the world entered winter. The camellias bloomed, and the three-foot-tall red maples looked like they were ablaze with fire.
A yellow chrysanthemum left by the landlord also bloomed. The flowers of the garden are beautiful, but the elegance of the fall,
is in the trees of my house.
If I were a poet, I would have sung "I have no pity for the chrysanthemums",
I am ashamed that I can't sing the lines "the articles in the sea have fallen to the cloth".
Behind the house there is a ginkgo, every late fall, a tree of golden yellow, the wind at first, the leaves fluttering, just like the fairy jade fan fell to the ground.
Waking up in the middle of the night, I suspected that it was the sound of rain; getting up early and opening the door to see, after a night, full of splendor.
The roofs and eaves of the houses are full of fallen leaves, and the maples are red in color.
I have spread the gold and green brocade all over the yard.
Five
The leaves have fallen, and there is a sense of desolation.
However, the daylight and moonlight are gradually increasing,
and it is delightful to look up at the stars with few obstructions.
Also, his essay 'Asuka' was selected for the 7th class textbook of the Shangjiao edition
Maybe Return
'May as well return'
'May as well return' is one of Asuka's most popular novels. In the late Meiji era, Japan began to popularize family novels, which are popular novels based on family life, known as popular literature. Rather Return is also a family novel, but it is different from ordinary popular novels. Most popular novels succumb to long-standing traditions and contain elements of nonresistance. But the purpose of literature and art is to advance the masses, so it must contain elements of resistance. Since "Rather Than Return" is a serious protest against feudalism in Japan, it is not the so-called popular literature of Japan at that time, but a monumental realist novel.
What is depicted in "Better to Return" is a tragedy under the oppression of the feudal family system. It contains many issues: the problem of mother-in-law-daughter-in-law relationship, the problem of mother-child relationship, the problem of husband-wife relationship, the problem of old and new morality, the problem of infectious diseases, the problem of righteousness and human feelings, the problem of women's liberation, etc. At the time of Asuka, countless young men and women in Japan were oppressed by their feudal families, and they felt the pain of the many problems mentioned above with their own doubts. Asuka's "Better to Return" touched the heartstrings of countless young men and women, aroused their ****songs, and aroused their desire to reform society. His writing is beautiful and his descriptions are touching; but beyond the simple beauty and sadness, he also makes the readers feel excited, for the work is rich in social and revelatory qualities. He points out the state of resignation of women at that time; he points out the absurd and corrupt morality of the Japanese bourgeoisie. What he describes is not an occasional individual tragedy, but a typical tragedy. After reading this work, one can clearly feel that the cold cruelty, false benevolence and stupidity and stubbornness of the upper class are precisely the reasons why the heroine of this book, the prodigal son, died tragically in heaven. The problems in "Better to Return" are not unique to Japan, but are shared by people of all countries who have yet to free themselves from the yoke of feudalism. Therefore, this work has not only been sold in more than a hundred editions in Japan and adapted into plays and movies; it has also been translated into Chinese, English, German, Polish, and Russian, and widely spread all over the world, becoming one of the masterpieces of world literature.
The plots of the novels are not made up out of thin air, but are written on the basis of realistic models. According to Saku Fujimura, the editor of the Dictionary of Japanese Literature, there was a Japanese army general named Oyama Iwami who had a daughter named Nobuko. Nobuko married a viscount named Yataro Mishima. After the marriage, Nobuko contracted a lung disease. At that time, there were no effective medicines, and the disease was fatal and easily contagious. The Mishima family asked the Oyama family for a divorce. The Oyama family first refused, but later a matchmaker convinced their daughter and Nobuko finally divorced her husband. She returned to her mother's home and died soon afterward. In 1896, Ashika met a woman, the wife of Lieutenant Fukuya, an aide-de-camp to Admiral Oyama, at the Yanagiya Inn in Yakko, and she told Ashika about Nobuko's tragic history, and Ashika based her novel, "Better to Return," on this fact.
Ashika recalled in the preface to the 100th edition of "Rather Return" that "when I reread it after a thousand years, I was reminded of something. It was the event of a certain twilight that formed the embryo of this novel. It was twelve years ago, and I was staying at the Yanagiya Inn in Sangju-soja. A woman had come to this hot spring place to convalesce from an illness, and had brought a boy with her. ...... All the inns were full. ...... My wife and I talked it over, and we gave her one of the two rooms we had rented. I discussed with my wife and gave her one of the two rooms we had rented ...... One late summer evening, when the sky was cloudy and quiet, the boy went out to play, and the woman and the two of us chatted about this tragic incident ...... This was the first time I had heard of the prodigal son's story. The prodigal son suffered from tuberculosis and was forced to divorce, Takeo was devastated, Lt. Gen. Kataoka was furious and took his daughter back, built a convalescent room for his sick daughter, took the prodigal son on his last trip to Keihan, and at the funeral, he returned the flowers sent by the Kawashima family on the spot - these were the facts of the conversation. The woman recounted them with bitter sorrow, I leaned against the pillar of the niche listening in bewilderment, and my wife bowed her head and was speechless....... Speaking of the tragedy of her deathbed, she said, 'It is said of her that she said so, but wished that she would never be a woman again in the next life.' Here the whimper ceased to be a sound, and the conversation broke off. I felt something like an electric current run through my spinal cord.
"The woman soon recovered her health, so she took that night's conversation as a parting gift and went back to the capital city....... While standing on the seashore in the autumn air, a figure appeared in a trance. The pity was so great that it caused anguish and felt that something had to be done. So in the bones of this conversation arbitrarily add some sinews, grass into an immature novel ...... If there is no poor writing and can cause the reader to move the place, that is the teaser summer that night through the mouth of the woman and told the 'prodigal son' himself in the readers You all talk, I'm just the telephone 'line'."
The following is an example of natural description to conclude this essay. At the beginning of Better to Return, it describes how when the prodigal son and his husband were on a newlywed trip and staying on the third floor of the Ikaho Kanmei Hotel, the prodigal son stood in front of the window and looked out at the sunset view, and saw two floating clouds, of which Asuka writes: "These two abundantly soft and lovely, large enough to be embraced, slowly left the top of Mt. Akagi, and emitted their light in the ten thousand-mile, unobstructed air like double-flying golden butterflies, moving leisurely toward Mt. Ashigara in the The clouds were slowly leaving the top of Mt. Soon after the sun sank in the west, the cold wind rose up, these two clouds faded into rose-colored, up and down to fly, in the sunset sky farther and farther away from floating for a while; the lower one gradually smaller, unconsciously disappeared without a trace; the remaining one turned gray, bewildered in the air wandering." This is not a mere description of the landscape; these two clouds are the symbols of the two main characters of the book, the prodigal son and the martial man, and one of the sentences and one of the words is allusive and punny everywhere. With its profoundly expository and protesting nature, and with such wonderful writing, Better to Return is both thoughtful and artistic, and has become a masterpiece of modern Japanese literature.