Comparing Morio Kita’s The House of Nire with Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks

It is well known that Kita was enamored with the works of Thomas Mann (1875-1955) and particularly with his precocious masterpiece Buddenbrooks (1901), published to great acclaim when Mann was only twenty-six. It is possible that Kita hoped to emulate his idol's early success because he began work on the novel that was eventually to be published in English as The House of Nire at a similarly youthful age, when he was in his early twenties, a medical student at Tohoku University in the late 1940s.

Kita's infatuation with the works of Thomas Mann dates to his high school days, when he happened to be instructed by a teacher famous as a translator of the German writer's novels. In any case, he was ideally placed to be receptive to their appeal. Kita had been raised in a Westernized household that was filled with works of European literature. His father and grandfather had each spent several years in Germany where they studied psychopathology, a natural course for them to follow as the Japanese medical profession established in the Meiji Era was modeled on that of Germany, and students of Japan's top universities, and especially those training to become doctors, were expected to master German. At the start of the Meiji Era, many Germans had gone to Japan to work as advisors for the new government. They were instrumental in the creation of 'modern Japan,' particularly in the fields of medicine, law, and military affairs.

It was almost inevitable that Kita would be drawn to Mann and that, in becoming a writer himself, he often would mention the author who had inspired him. In his 'bildungsroman,' Ghosts, Kita reminisces about his early acquaintance with Mann's writing. In his most popular humorous work, Doctor Mambo at Sea (1960), based on his own experiences as a ship's doctor, Kita describes a pilgrimage to Mann's birthplace in Germany, where he finds that reality fails to live up to expectation: the man he reveres is held in no such reverence by his compatriots, the prototype for the Buddenbrooks house is disappointingly plain.

The opening pages of The House of Nire also depict a family seemingly at the height of its fortunes. This novel, too, opens with a celebration that constitutes an affirmation of family prestige and commercial success. The patriarch and architect of the family's success, Kiichiro Nire, is presiding over the annual 'Prize-Giving Day' at the Nire Hospital, held every year on December 14, to commemorate the founding of the hospital fourteen years earlier, in 1904. Every member of the hospital staff, no matter how lowly his position, is awarded a prize in recognition of his service.

Kiichiro Nire resembles a latter-day Japanese version of M. Poirot in his inordinate pride, in his fussy neatness, in his large, elaborate mustache and hair dyed an improbably glossy black. In fact, he is not who he seems: it is all a matter of appearances. Just as the Nire hospital conceals, behind its impressive façade, gimcrack building materials and squalor, with its imitation marble pillars, imitation brick walls, imitation coral, and a jumble of shacks squatting behind the hospital and hidden by it, so Kiichiro seems a man of long-standing wealth and property and position, but appearances are deceptive.

Kiichiro Nire is a self-made man, an individual born in poverty and obscurity as Jinsaku Kanazawa, inhabitant of a small, undistinguished village in Japan's northeast. In financial straits, Jinsaku's father, a farmer, gave up his fourth son to another farmer, residing in a neighboring village, for adoption, but the boy then committed an unpardonable act by running away from his adoptive father, unhappy with his new life, and returned to live in the village of his birth with his elder sister before running away once more.

Reappearing in the village many years later, he astonishes his family and friends by his appearance of prosperity and by the papers he brandishes that certify to his having qualified as a bona fide doctor. Jinsaku then disappears once more, returning much later to startle and amaze the villagers yet again, this time, with the news that he has married, that he is the owner of a clinic, and that he has changed his name. Jinsaku Kanazawa, the fourth son of a poor family, destined, it seemed, for poverty himself, has re-invented himself, transforming the unwanted child with an undistinguished name and a bleak future into a wealthy, successful individual who now styles himself Kiichiro Nire. This 'new' man has even invented his surname, taking delight in explaining the difficult Chinese characters that comprise 'Nire' to the baffled villagers. Like the hospital edifice he has had constructed with such loving care, Kiichiro Nire is a kind of optical illusion.

Despite the institution's apparent prosperity, Kiichiro's wife, the formidable and forbidding Hisa, is aware of the parlous state of its finances. She is like a swan, proud and elegant, swimming with apparent serenity and ease on the pond of life, but her legs, concealed from public view, are frantically kicking in an effort to keep the enterprise afloat. Too, it is unclear how many of the staff Kiichiro employs possess actual medical qualifications. Also, at least one of the medical specialists listed as a staff member of the hospital, whose fame and prowess is intended to enhance its prestige, has yet to meet a single patient.

Like Kiichi Saito, on whom he is based, Kiichiro is an eccentric character enamored with all things German and, like Saito, Kiichiro spends time studying medicine in Germany, the course he is later to urge on his adoptive son, Tetsukichi. The special living quarters Kiichiro and his wife inhabit within the hospital are stuffed with German souvenirs. These are not the precious objects d' art that adorn the rooms of the Buddenbrook mansion but, rather, the cheap knickknacks and trinkets favored by a tourist. Like Consul Buddenbrooks, Kiichiro is eager to combine his business duties with political responsibilities. His position as the hospital's director, combined with a considerable outlay of funds, enable him to become elected to the Japanese House of Representatives as a Member. The bribes he has been obliged to extend to potential voters for his candidacy constitute one of the reasons why the Nire Hospital, despite its good reputation and numerous patients, is on the verge of bankruptcy at the beginning of the novel.

Naturally, the scions of Johann Buddenbrooks and Kiichiro Nire are expected to contract advantageous marriages that will further the family fortunes. Consul Buddenbrook has gratified expectations in marrying Elisabeth, one of the prosperous and powerful Krögers, landed aristocracy who own a luxurious property on the outskirts of the city. They 'lived in grand style,' a 'dazzling wealth….of a different sort from the solid if somewhat ponderous prosperity of the Buddenbrooks' (p. 57).

The Buddenbrook children prove less satisfactory in their performance of the duty of forming lucrative and prestigious alliances. Thomas fatally introduces an element of the artistic and the temperamental into the family gene pool by marrying Gerda Arnoldsen, a gifted violinist. Pious little Clara marries a poor pastor and dies young and childless. Christian's youthful quirks develop into full-blown eccentricities, and he fails to marry at all until his middle age, when he contracts an unsuitable alliance with a woman of dubious reputation by whom he has already had an illegitimate child. Alas, subservience of individual desires for the sake of the collective good proves no guarantee of fulfilment or success. Although Tony falls in love with a thoroughly unsuitable young man who belongs to the working class and, even worse, is a political firebrand, she renounces her dream of happiness with him when she decides that 'Just as it was Tom's job to work in the office, her calling in life was to add to the luster of her family and the firm of Johann Buddenbrook by marrying a wealthy and prominent man' (p. 103).

Although she does not love him, she agrees to wed her parents' choice of partner, Herr Bendix Grünlich, an apparently successful merchant from Hamburg. But her self-sacrifice is in vain. Grünlich is a fraud, his business a sham, and Tony divorces him when he goes bankrupt. Left a widow with a small daughter, she later marries once more, but this husband is revealed to be a philanderer, and she ends up leaving him as well.

As for Kiichiro Nire, he and Hisa produce five children and adopt three others. Kiichiro's eldest natural son, Oshu, proves initially less satisfactory than his two adoptive ones: Tetsukichi and Tatsuji. Oshu is an indolent, passive boy who cannot pass his high school entrance exams while Tetsukichi is a bright, capable child of humble origins who quickly qualifies as a doctor and assumes joint control of the hospital with Kiichiro. Tatsuji is a kind of mentally-deficient monster; Kiichiro adopts him in the hope that his new protégé, with his gigantic body, may someday become a famous sumo wrestler.

Tatsuji Nire is another example of Kita's drawing upon personal experience in composing his novel. An unusually large child named Bunjiro Sato was plucked from obscurity in rural Yamagata prefecture to be adopted by one of Kiichi Saito's relatives. Unlike Tatsuji, Bunjiro excelled in academic studies, but his size (at one point, he was 206 cm tall and weighed 200 kg) led to his being discovered by the sumo world. Bunjiro reluctantly abandoned his dream of becoming a pediatrician and, instead, is remembered as a 'gentle giant' of the sumo world, known as 'Degawatake Bunjiro'.

Kiichiro's eldest daughter, Ryuko, surpasses even her father in her pride in the family. She marries Tetsukichi in obedience to her father's wishes but Seiko, her younger sister, acknowledged as the family beauty, fails to put her own personal endowments to proper use. Seiko incurs Ryuko's wrath by marrying for love—a poor man whom her family regard as unsuitable—and she is disowned by the Nires, dying young in poverty, illness and disgrace. Seiko's deplorable act of self-indulgence results in disaster for her younger sister, Momoko. The Nires are so worried that Momoko might also follow inclination rather than duty in making a match that they force her into an arranged, loveless marriage when she is just an adolescent.

For both the Buddenbrooks and the Nires, things go from bad to worse with the next generation. It is not only that the children and grandchildren prove less than satisfactory. Both families are caught up in the inexorable grip of historical circumstances. The main focus of Buddenbrooks and The House of Nire is always on the family unit, but the particular individuals that comprise it are inevitably affected by the time and place in which they live although, as we shall see, Kita is far more anxious than Mann to plunge his characters into the maelstrom of contemporary events and to show how profoundly individuals can be influenced by their experiences.

In Buddenbrooks, Mann is reluctant to engage directly with the social drama of the age even though the backdrop of the novel, spanning the years from 1835 to 1877, includes some of the most dramatic episodes of nineteenth-century German history. These include the Revolutions of 1848, the Austro-Prussian War, the North German Confederation, and the establishment of the German Empire. Yet the rumblings of history outside the elegant house on Meng Strasse reach the Buddenbrooks, as they sit in their well-appointed drawing room, like the sound of distant thunder

Only the revolutions of 1848, which sought to challenge the old status quo with demonstrations by the proletarian masses against aristocracy and baroque absolutism, directly affect them. The liberals demanded freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, arming of the people, and a national German parliament. Such demands are anathema to Consul Buddenbrooks's father-in-law, the aristocratic Lebrecht Kröger, invariably described as a 'cavalier à la mode,' (p. 13). He is furious when the group he contemptuously dismisses as 'riffraff' approach the town hall and keep the council, holding a meeting there, captive, hurling the occasional brick through the windows of the building. Although the Consul manages to placate and disperse the mob, someone hurls a stone at Kröger's carriage as he is returning home that enters the carriage window. The stone falls harmlessly on the blankets enveloping the old man, but it is the proverbial 'last straw,' a symbol of the revolt of Germany's workers that has so incensed and outraged him. The 'cavalier' dies moments later, presumably of a heart attack.

Too, although the Buddenbrooks are businessmen rather than aristocrats like their relatives the Krögers, they increasingly find themselves challenged by a new breed of entrepeneurs who fail to play the game by the old rules. There are 'upstart' individuals like Hinrich Hagenström, a 'sly fox,' who snaps the order for a large consignment of rye to be shipped to Holland right from under the Buddenbrooks' noses (p. 59). Julia Hagenström is little Tony's bête noire as they walk together as children to school, and the firm of Strunck and Hagenström come to assume the form of the Buddenbrooks' principal rivals as the novel unfolds, with the former enjoying considerable expansion at the expense of the latter. To add insult to injury, Julie Hagenström and her brother Hermann manage to contract just the sort of lucrative, socially-desirable marriages that have eluded poor Tony, Christian and Clara, with Julie marrying into one of the best families, the Mollendorpfs, and Hermann wedding the daughter of the richest man in town, whose wholesale lumber business enables him to leave each of his three children two million marks.

It is not a tale of one family rising as the other inexorably declines. The Buddenbrooks enjoy a period of success in the early 1860s, when the business flourishes and, on the death of James Mollendorpf, one of the town's senators, Thomas Buddenbrook is selected as his successor, narrowly beating his rival Hermann Hagenström. But Thomas becomes increasingly exhausted with the full weight of responsibility for the family and the firm resting on his shoulders alone. He collapses and dies in his mid forties, the business founders and is sold, and, in the final turn of the wheel of fortune, the Meng Strasse house is taken over by the Hagenströms.

Mann's portrait of the decline of the house of Buddenbrooks interestingly links their collapse to the enervating effects of a prosperity sufficient to allow individuals the leisure and inclination to pursue cultural interests. A theme of this novel, and of many of Mann's works, indicative of the divided loyalties he felt as a child to his mother and father, is the conflict between art and business. Buddenbrooks implies that exposure to music, art and literature can weaken moral fiber. Each successive generation of Buddenbrooks is increasingly incapable of dealing with the cut and thrust of commercial life. Capable of irony and introspection, sensitive and intellectual, the latter-day Buddenbrooks have lost the will to succeed; they lack the requisite ruthlessness that confers the competitive edge.

The House of Nire also spans a dramatic period, if one subsequent to that described in Buddenbrooks, Kita's novel covers the tumultuous years from 1918 to 1945. Noteworthy events include the end of the first world war, the Great Kanto Earthquake, the Manchurian Incident, the rise of Hitler, the Rape of Nanking, the attack on Pearl Harbor, the starvation of Japanese soldiers in the South Pacific, the firebombing of Tokyo, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Kita weaves actual historical happenings into the body of his narrative much more than Mann had done, although his focus, like Mann's, is on the individuals these events affect and influence. The novel opens in 1918, the year of the Armistice and of Spanish flu, and the inhabitants of the Nire Hospital are delighted by news of the former, not because of any animus they bear towards the defeated Germans, but because the occasion offers a chance to celebrate, which they duly do.

The next historical event to affect the family is the Great Kanto Earthquake. Kiichiro and Tetsukichi's brother, Shirokichi, waiting in September 1923 for a steam train from Odawara to Tokyo, have their journey disrupted by powerful tremors that flatten the train station and kill most of its staff. Shirokichi cannot imagine an earthquake strong enough to effect such damage and originally surmises that Mt. Hakone must have erupted. No trains are running, and the pair must pick their way through scenes of unimaginable devastation in their attempt to return to Tokyo. They have to contend not only with hunger and thirst and exhaustion, broken bridges and damaged roads, but with the possibility that Shirokichi, with his thick lips, might be mistaken for a Korean—chosen as scapegoats for the largest physical catastrophe to hit Japan—and killed by an angry mob.

The Nire family and their hospital escape unscathed from the earthquake but, ironically, the hospital is razed by fire shortly afterward. To make matters worse, Kiichiro may unwittingly have been responsible. It seems that the highly flammable paint he had had applied to the buildings, to lend them an air of fresh elegance to welcome his adoptive son back from Germany, was partly responsible for the fire, and legal restrictions prevent the rebuilding of the hospital in its initial location. Kiichiro rises to the challenge, but at the cost of his life. In 1926 he arranges for a loan that will enable him to put up a new hospital in a new location, in undeveloped Matsubara. He collapses and dies while he is measuring the recently-purchased land, and Tetsukichi must take on the directorship of the projected new hospital.

Kita was drawing on facts in constructing this section of the novel. Kiichi Saito, just like his fictional counterpart, Kiichiro Nire, had erected his hospital on rented land and, just like Kiichiro, had allowed the insurance to lapse on the property. The Aoyama hospital's destruction by fire was financially devastating for him. Too, just like Tetsukichi Nire, his fictional counterpart, Mokichi Saito found the work of rebuilding the hospital and then acting as its director a great struggle. A commemorative plaque located on the land once occupied by the hospital displays one of Saito's tanka poems, whose meaning, roughly, translates into 'Please understand how difficult it was for a person like me to serve as the director of the hospital'.

Ryuko and Tetsukichi's children—Shun'ichi, Aiko and Shuji—grow up in a Japan in which the military plays a prominent role in daily life: the army's 'bold exploits during the Manchurian and Shanghai incidents had confirmed the military's role as defender of the Japanese lifelines and creator of national power and prestige' (p. 257). Shun'ichi and his younger brother Shuji conceive a passionate fascination for aircraft, and Shun'ichi predicts a war between Japan and America. Japan's war with China, commencing in 1937, signals the end of their childhood and the emergence of a new Japan, bent on patriotic displays. Shun'ichi is posted to Indochina as a lieutenant in the Medical Corps, Tatsunori Shiroki, the man Aiko loves, participates in the attack on Pearl Habor but later is killed when his aircraft carrier Zuikaku is bombed by the Americans near Guadalcanal, and Shuji, with his classmates, is trained to become a soldier. In the final years of the war, Shuji and Aiko become munitions workers in a Tokyo under constant bombardment, and Shuji becomes obsessed with thoughts of death. The Aoyama hospital has been closed and the Matsubara one is no longer the 'Nire Hospital': it has been taken under new management.

The first great night fire raid on Tokyo, in March 1945, inspires Tetsukichi to leave the city to seek refuge and safety at his old family home in rural Yamagata. Aiko, Ryuko and Shuji barely escape the conflagration of Tokyo, hit by incendiary bombs, and Aiko's face is badly disfigured by the flames. The atomic bombs are dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the war ends, and, against the odds, they all survive, even Shun'ichi, rescued from Wake Island on the verge of death by starvation.

While the Nires, apart from Kiichiro, are allowed to live, the principal Buddenbrook males die and, in this respect, Kita is kinder to his fictional creations than Mann had been. In the months before his death, when Thomas Buddenbrooks realizes that he faces financial ruin and feels too exhausted to make any further efforts to restore the family's fortunes, he draws hope from one source: his beloved son, Hanno. For a period, Thomas is sustained by his 'inherited and ingrained sense of family' which can grant him a vision of an old age in quiet retirement, when he might see Hanno as the prosperous, successful head of the family business (p. 601). Thomas believes that 'he had lived in his ancestors and would continue to live in his descendants' (p. 631).

Thomas has a brief moment of revelation when he reads Schopenhauer and decides that the conclusion of his personal existence should be a matter of little moment to himself or to anyone else. He is comforted by the notion of a unity of all that lives. But then Thomas returns to his normal middle-class consciousness, embraces his worries, and makes a new will. In the cold light of reason, he accepts that Hanno's career lies in music, and he stipulates that the family firm be dissolved within the year following his death, which occurs shortly afterwards. It is generally accepted that Mann based the character of Hanno on himself, but he consigns his fictional counterpart to an unfortunate end. Aged fifteen, young Hanno dies of typhoid, a death signaling the end of the Buddenbrooks dynasty.

If Hanno is a version of Thomas Mann, a similar claim might be made that Kita's own consciousness informs the character of Shuji, whose sensitive apprehension of events enlivens the second half of the The House of Nire. Shuji, like Hanno, is an introspective soul who finds it difficult to make friends and who fails exams and seems unsuited for 'ordinary' life. But, in the opinion of Susan Hinerfeld (1985: 1), Shuji has an important destiny to fulfill: he 'will become a writer, and tell of these vanquished people and their vanished life' just as Kita chose that role—depicting Japan between 1918 and 1945 and, in particular, describing his own family.

Despair characterizes the closing section of each novel. Despite the unlikely survival of herself, her children and husband, Ryuko Nire is unhappy and lonely because she is disappointed that her family fails to possess her father's enterprising spirit. Kiichiro Nire had made his fortune despite the humblest of beginnings. Similarly, Tony questions whether life has any meaning. She is devastated by the deaths of her parents, her brother and beloved nephew and by the loss of the Buddenbrooks' firm and house, complaining that life 'crushes things deep inside us, it shatters our faith' (p. 730).

But, equally, both novels conclude on an affirmative note, stressing the indomitable nature of the human spirit. At the end of Buddenbrooks, the surviving characters are comforted by the prospect of a reunion with departed family members after their own deaths. In the conclusion of The House of Nire, the resourceful Ryuko demonstrates that she is her father's daughter in determining to carry on, no matter what. As she grinds up the tea leaves that she uses to supplement the family's diet with extra nutrition she decides 'She would not give in….She would never surrender' (p. 765).

Mann and Kita both refer to Schopenhauer in their lengthy family sagas. Thomas Buddenbrook and Kiichiro Nire are described as finding inspiration in the German's philosophy, and the epiphany Tetsukichi experiences just before suffering a paralyzing stroke is remarkably similar to the momentary happiness Thomas Buddenbrook experiences after reading Schopenhauer's chapter 'Concerning Death and Its Relation to the Indestructibility of Our Essential Nature.' A similar short-lived epiphany is experienced by Hans Castorp, the protagonist of The Magic Mountain, when he nearly perishes after unwisely persisting in skiing in poor weather. Williams points out the parallel with Buddenbrooks (1986: 38): 'The saving grace vouchsafed to him in the blizzard, when he glimpses the true relationship between life and death and the outline of a new humanism, fades even by that same evening, like Thomas Buddenbrook's vision in an earlier novel'.

The drama of the family is played out against the promise of eventual release from individual suffering; the vicissitudes of fortune pale beside the vast peace of eternity. Buddenbrooks and The House of Nire testify to a way of life, now vanished, and memorialize the inhabitants, now passed away, who peopled that 'foreign land': the past. If Mann and Kita fail to find complete consolation in Schopenhauer's assertion that even after death, individuals return to the life force and thus retain their connectedness to all living things, they can be satisfied that their own works have conferred a kind of immortality on the families they present in their novels in such loving detail.

According to Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit, shishōsetsu developed and became important in the early twentieth century as an 'advanced form' of shizenshugi, a 'Japanese naturalism' that took its orientation from European naturalism and 'declared its dedication to truth and "straightforward" description' (1996: 3). In Hijiya-Kirschnereit's opinion, however, shizenshugi differed markedly from European naturalism in its 'lack of analytic description and the relative neglect of hereditary and environmental factors' (1996: 28). She believes that after the heady embrace of all things western, accompanied by the rejection of all things Japanese, that characterized the early Meiji period, there was an inevitable backlash that saw the rise of militarism, imperialism and 'the mystification of the state as expressed in theocratic Shinto teachings' (1996: 18). At this critical juncture in Japan's development into a modern nation state, its intellectuals felt increasingly alienated and retreated from public life to follow the 'inward path'.

The evolution of shizenshugi into shishōsetsu confirmed and emphasized this trend. Whereas shizenshugi had advocated an objective, value-free, detailed description of 'reality,' in shishōsetsu the observer (the author) took precedence over the observed. What was important was the writer's sincerity. What he wrote about was confessional and private.

It has been argued that the European nineteenth-century naturalist style was particularly appropriate for Kita because, like fellow Japanese writers Yaeko Nogami (1885-1985) and Otohiko Kaga (1929-), he was impatient with the narrowly personal perspective of shishōsetsu. Kaga, for example, rejected the solipsism of shishōsetsu because it included 'practically no criticism of contemporary issues, nor any socially revolutionary components' (Nakamura, 2000: 143). For Kaga, the shishōsetsu writers who focus on accounts of themselves ignore the fact that theirs is a limited perspective, a 'conceit, based on an unjustified belief in the truth of their perceptions and the value of generalisations drawn from narrow experience' (Nakamura, 2000: 143).

In composing Buddenbrooks and The House of Nire as novels written in the style of the roman-fleuve, with the Buddenbrook and the Nire families providing the unifying focus of stories that cover a wide tapestry of individuals and events, Mann and Kita could widen their focus of vision. By portraying their characters against the backdrop of dramatic historical periods in Germany and Japan, Mann and Kita could offer a commentary on their own societies.

While Mann rarely alludes to external events in Buddenbrooks, we can still catch the occasional glimpse of a country in the process of rapid change. Adolphs and Schwarz (1988: 361) describe it as a time in Germany that witnessed the 'fading away of the classical education based on the humanities and its replacement by a technical, goal-oriented system'. It is this new, sterile, competitive environment that the sensitive young Hanno finds so uncongenial, a sentiment shared by Mann. Pascal (1973: 35) notes that 'we can find in Buddenbrooks his strong preference for the traditionalist Buddenbrooks over the "bourgeois" Hagenströms'. Too, Mann must have been aware that the age of the paternalistic family firms such as his father's and the fictional one portrayed in Buddenbrooks were coming to an end; Lübeck had begun to industrialize; the 'anachronistic' system of business observed by its old merchant houses was being replaced by 'new institutions such as stock corporations' (Adolphs and Schwarz: 1988: 356). It was appropriate that Mann celebrated the old, vanishing traditions in the form of a 'family' novel, for the defence of the family and the idealization of family feeling were the great themes of the age that was passing.

Given that Buddenbrooks, which can be seen as one of the last of the great 'old-fashioned' novels in its style and content, had been published sixty years before, it is all the more curious that Kita should have chosen to model his own first novel so closely upon it. Too, it is ironic that The House of Nire, written by a Japanese in the mid-twentieth century, is in some respects, even more representative of the nineteenth-century European naturalist tradition than Buddenbrooks. As we have seen, the Buddenbrook family takes center stage in Mann's novel, with events in the wider world barely impinging upon their consciousness. They are largely insulated from the changes and calamities of their age by wealth and privilege, with only Lebrecht Kröger seriously affected—felled by a heart attack caused by shock when he encounters one of the mobs of Germany's 1848 revolutions.

The House of Nire, on the other hand, adheres more closely to the tradition of European naturalism in portraying characters framed within the context of social institutions and historical events, who are influenced by, and who reflect, the background in which they are placed. One or more of Kita's characters is depicted as being inextricably involved in all the noteworthy events of those years. The Nires are placed in mortal danger by earthquakes and fires. They face death during the war years from starvation, air raids, and bombs. They are shaped and changed and, in Aiko Nire's case, literally scarred by their experiences. If Kita fails to condemn the militarization of society that led up to the war, it is because he is too intent on offering shrewd psychological insights into those individuals who ignorantly followed and obeyed rulers who led them to destruction and who subsequently were forced to carry the full brunt of the consequences of the defeat.

There is one exception: Kiichiro Nire. It is a case of 'truth being stranger than fiction'. There was little in Kiichiro Nire's background to portend his future success as the owner of a prosperous and prestigious mental clinic, just as it was improbable that Kiichiro Saito, born into a poor, humble family in rural Yamagata prefecture, would someday qualify as a brain surgeon and serve his country as an MP in the House of Commons as Kiichi Saito. Kita had to sacrifice probability in fiction because he was depicting the real-life achievements of his own grandfather.

Donald Roden (1986: 126) praises Kita for his unsentimental portrait of Japan: 'one leaves this novel with a renewed awareness of the brutalities of the age'. Roden compares Kita favorably to Yukio Mishima in his refusal to indulge in 'ideological gloss or escapist fantasy'. This is particularly true in the final section of the novel, which describes Japan in the agonizing last months of the war. It has been conjectured that Kita's 'dour representation' of this time may represent an ironic commentary on what he believed were his father's 'misplaced enthusiasms;' Kita was dismayed by the ardent nationalism the distinguished poet and brilliant doctor had developed during the war years (Rimer: 1997: 91). Kita may have heard his own father describe Americans as 'Hairy damn foreign swine' (p. 518) and admit to the intoxicating happiness at Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor that he attributes to Tetsukichi in his novel. But Kita's sensitively nuanced portrayal of Shuji, Kiichiro's teenage grandson offers a beacon of hope in the pervasive darkness as Shuji struggles to survive and comes to realize that a new way of life may arise from Japan's ruins. Too, it may be that, just as Mann depicted a vanishing world in Buddenbrooks, Kita wished to commemorate a prewar Japan—optimistic and naive, confident and brave—that was buried in the rubble of the second war. A new Japan would rise from the ashes, but it would significantly differ from that which had not known the humiliation of defeat and occupation and the dethronement of the emperor from his semi-divine status.

In their epic tales, Mann and Kita not only offer semi-autobiographical portraits of their families and social chronicles of their countries but also create novels that are self-consciously 'literary,' that are works of art. Both authors employ, for example, the 'leitmotif' or 'unifying theme' that is a concept usually associated with music and particularly with the operas of Wagner. Adolphs and Schwarz (1988: 360) describe Mann's fondness for the use of the leitmotif in his writing to his admiration for that composer. They observe a

parallel between Mann's literary leitmotiv and Wagner's…Both devices serve a similar function: to create thematic and structural unity by guiding the reader or listener's attention to an artificial connection between details.

The leitmotifs they identify in Buddenbrooks include a disquisition on happiness, with family members expected to sacrifice their own hopes and desires for the sake of the common good. There is also the suggestion that the covetable Meng Strasse house functions as an evil omen rather than as a symbol of prosperity; it is a venue that seems to contribute to the decline of families, with the downfall of the Ratenkamps mirrored by that of the Buddenbrooks and, presumably, the same fate will befall the Hagenströms, who move in afterwards. There is, too, the notorious leitmotif of teeth as an indicator of mental and physical health, with bad teeth signaling either illness or nervous collapse: in 'the first part of the novel the reader learns that Thomas has bad teeth; later, before his fiftieth birthday, he goes to the dentist and dies on his way home of a complete physical breakdown, symbolized by a decayed, hollow tooth' (Adolphs and Schwarz, 1988: 363).

Kita similarly presents his panoply of the three generations of the Nire household in what has been described as a 'complex symphonic fashion' (Rimer, 1997: 91). At the drama's core towers the figure of Kiichiro Nire, described as one of the great comic creations of fiction, who, even posthumously, seems to guide or influence the actions of his descendants. Around the central focus of the novel that this character provides there is a vast and vivid cast of characters, related to him by blood, marriage or adoption. These lesser figures dance to Kiichiro's tune even when the founder of the house of Nire has been reduced to the dust of death. They provide the harmony of the fugue against Kiichiro's dominating personality, which strikes the major chord.

Although I have read the two books in English translation, it is possible to glimpse in Buddenbrooks what H.B. Garland (1976: 108) identifies as Mann's characteristic note: '[c]ool detachment, masterly disposition, and ironic playfulness'. He is the puppet-master pulling the strings, remotely, dispassionately observing and analyzing his characters' struggles. Kita, on the other hand, seems to acknowledge no distance between himself and the strange and wonderful people he describes. Their pains and pleasures are rendered as his own.

The European naturalist novel's employment of the omniscient narrator provides an interesting perspective on the authors who use it, who appropriate the role of 'god' in their tales. Again, it is curious that Mann kills off Hanno, his fictional prototype, with a sudden case of typhoid, and it is fascinating, if probably unfruitful, to conjecture that Mann was gripped by a reserve of self-loathing, even at the youthful age when he penned Buddenbrooks. There is also an echo of Mann's belief, expanded more fully in The Magic Mountain and Death in Venice, that one must pass through sickness and death to arrive at a higher plane of sanity and health, although poor Hanno is not allowed this metamorphosis.

Kita, on the other hand, allows his counterpart, Shuji, to live. Kita clasps his fictional creations in a warm, life-affirming embrace. There is no scorn for the weak or contempt for the wicked: good and evil, benevolent and malicious characters alike are portrayed with humor and compassion. The desperately lonely protagonist who figures in many Japanese novels is absent from Kita's which represents, rather, a mock-epic remarkable for what David Goodman describes as its 'endearing combination of humor and compassion' (1984: 318) that bathes its large cast of eccentric characters in a soft, forgiving glow.

Conclusion

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