The years from 1966 to 1972 can be called the "years of renewed self-confidence." Japan had earned the world's respect for the flawless organization of the 1964 Olympic Games. In 1970, America agreed to return Okinawa to Japan (effected in 1972). The economy continued to boom, and even the oil crisis of 1973 did not fundamentally change that. The early 1970s were a period of rapid economic growth.
In the literary sphere, a new generation of writers appeared on stage between 1966 and 1974, those born in the 1930s. These authors differed notably from their predecessors because of their move away from the overt social and political commentary (particularity as directed against the system that supported Japan's involvement in World War II) then common both in recent works of literature, and as a measure by which literature was measured. Because this new group of authors turned their gaze from society to the individual, looking inward, engaging the fears and fantasies of an urban population beset by a crisis of identity in a time of rapid economic growth, they were called "the introverted generation" (naiko no sedai). They pursued depth of psychological description.
Young writers of this period found themselves alienated not only from
the older generation, but also from the government and other sources of
authority. Major authors of this "group" were Furui Yoshikichi, Goto Meisei, Abe Akira, and Oba Mineko (Kuroi Senji, Tomioka Taeko and Hino Keizo are also counted to the introverted generation, but they started writing later).
The writers of the previous postwar generations write large, important novels in their maturity, such as Shi no toge
(1960-1971) by Shimao Toshio, Fuji (1971) by Takeda Taijun, Reite senki
(1971) by Ooka Shohei, Shi no shima (1969-1971) by Fukunaga Takehiko, and Seinen no
wa (1971) by Noma Hiroshi, etc. But none of these novels has been translated.
In 1968, Kawabata Yasunari received the Nobel prize in Literature. On
a negative note, he died by his own hand in 1972, while Mishima Yukio had
already committed seppuku in a violent incident in 1970.
Although important novels were written in this period (the last 3 volumes of Mishima's Sea of Fertility, Oe's The Silent Cry, Endo's Silence, Ariyoshi's The Doctor's Wife and The Twilight Years, Nosaka's stories American Hijiri and Grave of Fireflies), this was a relatively poor period, especially when we look at translations. Both the "Introverted Generation" and the previous "Third Generation of Postwar Writers" which had also turned inward and was now at its height as regards published works, have had difficulties appealing to foreign readers with their blandness. But also the output of novels seems to have been lower than before (and later) - literature may have had a hard time establishing itself in these years of pure economic growth and materialism.
1966
The Beatles perform at Budokan in Tokyo.
Cultural Revolution sweeps across China.
(1) The historical novel Chinmoku ("Silence") by Endo Shusaku wins the Tanizaki prize.
Historical novel based on the martyrdom of the 17th c. Portuguese Jesuit missionaries and their Japanese converts in the Nagasaki area. Endo deals with the contradictions in the faiths of the Orient and the Occident and questions the transplanting of Christianity to incompatible cultures. Rodrigues, a young Portuguese Jesuit, travels to Japan with another priest to assist the local Church and investigate what happened to his mentor, priest Ferreira, who is said to have renounced his faith. The two fratres arrive in Japan in 1638, where they discover that the Christians are being tracked down by security officers. The Christians are obliged to distance themselves from their faith by trampling on the image of Christ (fumie). Those who refuse are slowly tortured to death. Rodrigues and his colleague are eventually arrested by the authorities. They witness the gruesome persecution of the Japanese Christians by the governor of Nagasaki, Inoue Masashige. In the past, the priests themselves were tortured and obliged to distance themselves from their faith, but recently the local Christians are tortured to put pressure on the priests. All the priests have to do to stop the suffering of the Japanese Christians is to deny their faith. While in prison, Rodrigues constantly hears the groans and howls of the tortured Christians and asks himself whether it is selfish and merciless to make others suffer for Christ. When finally led to a fumie, in his imagination Christ speaks through the image, inviting him to trample. "It was to share men's pain that I carried my cross." Rodrigues puts his foot on the fumie. An official tells Rodrigues, "Father, it was not by us that you were defeated, but by this mudswamp, Japan." The book
inspired feature film adaptations by Masahiro Shinoda (1971) and Martin Scorsese (2016).
[tr. William Johnston]
(2) Hanaoka Seishu no tsuma ("The Doctor's Wife") by Ariyoshi Sawako.
Doctor Hanaoka Seishu (1760-1835) was the first in the world to operate a patient under a general anesthetic (in 1804), with techniques which go back to both Dutch and Chinese medicine. Ariyoshi studied his personal papers for her novel, but the famous doctor is not the main character in the book: that is firstly his wife Kae, and after that his mother Otsugi. The rivalry between these two women for his attention is central to the novel and propels the story forward. While he is still developing the powder called tsusensan (a herbal mixture also containing some poisonous elements) they compete for the "privilege" of being his first human subject to test it. The doctor pretends not to notice the rivalry but benefits greatly from it. Kae goes blind as a result. The novel, which received the Woman's Literature Prize of 1967, was filmed by Masumura Yasuzo, with Ichikawa Raizo, Wakao Ayako and Takamine Hideko.
[tr. Wakako Hironaka & Ann Siller Konstant]
(3) Sasamakura ("Pillow of Grass") by Maruya Saiichi.
A novel on the theme of rebellion against the group. Hamada Shokichi is a 45-old clerk at a private university, with a wife who is much younger. He receives a letter informing him that his former girlfriend Akiko has died. That evokes memories of the past: during the whole period of WWII, Hamada was on the run as a draft evader. In 1940, Hamada, the son of a doctor in Tokyo, escapes from Tokyo
Station the day before he would have to enter military service. Originally from
Higher Industrial School, he travels around Japan repairing radios.
Later he meets a sand painter and learns that craft. This brings him to Sakaiminato in Tottori, where he meets a woman named Akiko. She is the daughter of a pawn shop in Uwajima, Shikoku,
and Hamada is able to hide in the pawn shop until the war ends. The delayed consequences of Hamada's refusal to conform keep influencing his life twenty years later, in 1965. But this novel is not so much an antiwar novel as an attempt to understand the full implications of any sustained act of rebellion against the group as a total entity. The same theme is treated in more comic fashion in Maruya's next novel, Singular Rebellion published six years later, in 1972.
[tr. Dennis Keene]
1967
Museum of Modern Japanese Literature (Nihon Kindai Bungakukan) established in April in Komaba Park in Meguro, Tokyo.
[Oe Kenzabuto]
(1) Man'en gan'nen no futtoboru ("The Silent Cry," lit. "Football in the First Year of Man'en (1860)") by Oe Kenzaburo wins the Tanizaki Prize. It is a consolidation of all the author's themes.
Like many of his earlier works, The Silent Cry has an unreal Arcadian
setting, cut off from the rest of Japan and populated with grotesque
characters. Two brothers, Takashi and Matsu, as well as Matsu's wife Natsu, return from Tokyo to the village of their childhood to negotiate the sale of some family property to “the Emperor of
Supermarkets,” a Korean who came to Shikoku in WWII and since that time dominates the village. One of the brothers leads the local youth in a rebellion against “the Emperor,” while the other one
tries to discover the secrets of his own family’s past. In Oe’s novel metropolitan Japan is selfish and violent, while rural Japan is disintegrating, populated by freaks such as Jin, “the fattest woman in Japan” and Gii, a draft-dodging hermit. Life in the countryside is characterized by suicides, drunkenness and sexual perversions. It is a world where all humanity has gone totally mad. Susan Napier has called this novel "perhaps his most successful effort to encapsulate Japanese history, society, and politics within a single tight narrative" (Escape from the Wasteland, p 196).
[tr. John Bester]
(2) In February, serialization starts of Honba ("Runaway
Horses," but as the title refers to only one person, the protagonist
Isao, it should be translated in the singular as "The Runaway Horse"),
the second part of the tetralogy Hojo no Umi ("The Sea of Fertility") by Mishima Yukio.
Set twenty years after Spring Snow,
in the early 1930s (a period of right-wing agitation and frequent
terrorist attacks by ultra-nationalists), this novel tells the story of
young Iinuma Isao, a rightist reactionary. Inspired by the Shinpuren
Revolt of 1876 (a xenophobic band of samurai violently opposed to the
openness to foreign things and modernization of the Meiji government), Isao becomes the instigator of a plot to
topple the zaibatsu that he feels have corrupted the country and
betrayed "the will of the Emperor." He is assured of the army's
assistance by the young Lieutenant Hori. Honda Shigekuni, the friend of
Kiyoaki from Spring Snow, now a judge, sees a telltale birthmark
under Isao's arm and realizes he must be the reincarnation of Kiyoaki,
although he does not resemble him in appearance or ideals. The terrorist
plot is betrayed and Isao is arrested; Honda decides to defend him as
his lawyer and manages to obtain a lenient sentence. But as soon as Isao
is released from prison, he kills one of the prime targets on
the conspirator's list and then commits seppuku while gazing at the
rising sun. The seppuku is described in gory details, all the more
hair-raising considering Mishima's own death in the same style just a
few year's later. Anyway, with its "crazy ideology of death" this is one
of Mishima's most unpleasant books; and the detailed description of the
ideology of the Shinpuren is simply boring. The idea that some young
people who are prepared to kill others and die themselves for their
ultra-nationalistic ideals are "pure" and to be admired, is fascism in
its most despicable form.
[tr. Michael Gallagher]
(3) Two short stories by Nosaka Akiyuki about WWII and its aftermath win the Naoki prize.
- Hotaru no haka ("Grave of Fireflies")
A semi-autobiographical short story, based on Nosaka's experiences before, during, and after the firebombing of Kobe in 1945. One of his sisters died as the result of sickness, his adoptive father died during the firebombing proper, and his younger adoptive sister died of malnutrition in Fukui. It was written as a personal apology to that sister for her death. On September 21, 1945, a homeless fourteen-year-old boy named Seita dies in Sannomiya Station, in the heart of Kobe. On his person is a candy tin; when a station worker tosses it into a field, three tiny bone fragments roll out. They are the bones of his little sister, Setsuko, who died in a Nishinomiya bomb shelter on August 22nd. The story flashes back to the Kobe air raids of June 5th. The children's father, a lieutenant in the navy, is away from home, and their ailing mother is killed. With nowhere to go, Seita puts his little sister on his back and sets off for the home of distant relatives, but there they are treated cruelly and Setsuko does not want to stay. Seita decides that they will live by themselves in a dugout bomb shelter, but at his age it is impossible for him to obtain food. Setsuko dies, and with a bundle of charcoal, Seita cremates her body. A cloud of fireflies gathers around her ashes. Nosaka wrote the story to cope with the guilt he felt as a survivor. The story was adapted as a beautiful anime feature film by Takahata Isao of Studio Ghibli.
[tr. James Abrams in Japan Quarterly, 1978]
- Amerika hijiki ("American hijiki")
A humorous take on the cultural misunderstandings between Japan and America. The title goes back to the fact that American black tea, donated to the Japanese population by the American occupation army, was mistaken for "hijiki", black, stringy seaweed which is a staple of the Japanese kitchen. The protagonist, Toshio, has been a pimp as a young boy in the Occupation, but is unable to fully escape that mentality even as a grown man. When 20 years later he has to entertain an American, Mr Higgins, he organizes a private strip show for him to demonstrate that Japanese girls are best. Part of the show is also a "performance" by a Japanese man, who becomes so nervous because of the American in the audience that he is unable to do his job - showing that even 20 years after the lost war, according to Nosaka, the Japanese still felt an inferiority complex towards Americans. The bitter taste of "American hijiki" symbolizes the bitterness of the lost war and the occupation.
[tr. Jay Rubin in Contemporary Japanese Literature, 1977]
(4) Moetsukita chizu ("The Ruined Map") by Abe Kobo
A
novel concerned with the loss of man's individual identity in the
labyrinths of a modern city. The protagonist, an unnamed detective, is hired by a beautiful, alcoholic woman to find her husband who has inexplicably disappeared. The detective is given a "ruined map" to help him during his search. Finally, the impossibility to find relevant clues leads the detective to an existential crisis - he feels his own identity blurring and in the end starts identifying himself with the lost man he is supposed to find - becoming lost himself.
[tr. E. Dale Saunders]
1968
University upheavals of 1968-69 begin.
Kawabata Yasunari wins the Nobel prize in Literature. At the award ceremony in Stockholm, he gives the speech "Japan, the Beautiful, and Myself."
Mishima Yukio writes his essay about the cult of the body and body building, "Sun and Steel."
(1) Akatsuki no tera ("The Temple of Dawn," third part of the tetralogy Hojo no Umi, "The Sea of Fertility") by Mishima Yukio (serialization starts in September).
Honda
Shigekuni, the lawyer from the previous two volumes, visits Thailand on
a business trip in 1941 and encounters a young girl, Ying Chan, a Thai
princess, whom he believes to be his school friend Kiyoaki's second
reincarnation (she seems to remember her previous lives and answers
questions correctly). The first half of the book is therefore set in
Thailand and India (for which Mishima traveled to both countries), but
reads unfortunately like a tourist brochure. It also contains a heavy
and detailed presentation of the Buddhist themes of the cycle of reincarnation, for example in the form of the
various religious texts studied by Honda, without any plot or character
development. The second half of the book is very different. It is set
eleven years later in Japan and the Thai princess is visiting Japan as a
foreign student. The nostalgic and poetic tone of Spring Snow is
now far to seek: instead, Mishima gives sardonic accounts of Japanese
society after WWII, which he sees as totally corrupted. Honda's role as a
high-minded judge and lawyer is also radically altered. He has become
rich by his law practice and built a villa with swimming pool at the
foot of Mt Fuji, where he receives guests. His role of observer has
taken a turn for the worse: he has a peephole fixed in the wall of the
guest room so that he can secretly spy on the love games of his
visitors. The peephole is in so far functional that it enables him to
confirm that the Thai princess has the mysterious birthmark, but it also
reveals that she and a Japanese women (another guest) are lovers. Not long after, the princess goes back to
Thailand. Fifteen years later Honda learns that she has died when she
was 20 (so soon after her return), bitten by a cobra in her garden. It
is rather unsatisfying that her death occurs offstage.
[tr. E. Dale Saunders & Cecilia Segawa Seigle]
(2) Oba Minako wins the 59th Akutagawa Prize for Sanbiki no kani ("Three Crabs")
Novella set in Alaska with an expatriate Japanese couple as protagonists. The author doesn't use the foreign atmosphere to create an exotic atmosphere but to create the sense of freedom, loneliness and homelessness that the characters feel. The story treats the sexual adventures of a housewife, a new theme in Japanese fiction at that time. It starts with sharp exchanges of dialogue between husband and wife, and later with their American friends at a party in their home. The couple seems to have an open marriage in which neither partner remains faithful to the other. Leaving a houseful of guests, the wife, Yuri, disappears for the evening to pick up a married stranger for a bout of casual sex. The title implies Yuri is not unlike the faceless crabs she saw at the seashore at the start of the story: creatures with no firm identity, yet able to blend into a new environment over a long period of time.
[tr. Yukiko Tanaka and Elizabeth Hanson in This Kind of Woman, 1982]
3. Clouds Above the Hill by Shiba Ryotaro, is a huge and ambitious novel about the Russo-Japanese War.
A
historical epic centering on the careers of two ambitious brothers who
work their way up from a rural backwater (Matsuyama, the capital of
Ehime Pref on the island of Shikoku) to positions of eminence in the new
post-1868 Meiji period. They are Akiyama Yoshifuru (1859-1930) and
Akiyama Saneyuki (1868-1918) - both are real historical figures - , who
will go on to play important roles in the Japanese Army and Navy,
respectively. They manage to build up a Japanese military capable of
holding its own against larger forces in the region, and that capability
is then soon tested in the Russo-Japanese War.
[Admiral Togo before the Battle of Tsushima]
Akiyama
Yoshifuru became a general in the Imperial Japanese Army, and is
considered the father of modern Japanese cavalry. Born to a poor samurai
family in the Matsuyama domain, he attended the (forerunner of the)
Imperial Japanese Army Academy) and Army Staff College, after which he
was sent as a military attaché to France to study cavalry tactics and
techniques. In the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, he led his troops in
the Battle of Mukden against the Cossack cavalry divisions of the
Imperial Russian Army. In 1916 Yoshifuru was promoted to full general.
After retiring from active military service in 1923, he became head of a
junior high school on his native Shikoku.
Akiyama Saneyuki
would become famous as the planner of the Battle of Tsushima in the
Russo-Japanese war. Originally he wanted to study literature and he was a
good friend from his childhood on of the haiku poet Masaoka Shiki. But
his elder brother Yoshifuru ordered him to join the Naval Academy
because of the economically severe condition of the Akiyama family. From
June 1897 to December 1899, Saneyuki was sent to the United States as a
naval attaché. He next served as instructor at the Navy War college and
at the outbreak of the war with Russia in 1904 was promoted to
Commander. After the war Saneyuki's career continued its upward movement
to vice admiral, at which time he had to retire due to illness.
The
third protagonist is Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902), also from Matsuyama,
who in his short life single-handedly brought the genres of haiku and
tanka into modern age. I am glad about the presence of the poet Shiki in
this novel, as he brings a softer and cultural note to the story. It is
pity that he dies in the first pages of part 2 (of 4), but that is
based on real life...
Shiki turned haiku into a legitimate
literary genre and argued that haiku should be judged by the same
yardstick that is used when measuring the value of other forms of
literature - that was contrary to views held by prior haiku
practitioners. His particular style rejected "the puns or fantasies
often relied on by the old school" in favor of "realistic observation of
nature". Like other Meiji period writers, Shiki was influenced by the
dedication to realism in Western literature.
Shiki's
achievements are all the more remarkable considering that he suffered
from tuberculosis much of his life. In 1888 / 1889 he began coughing up
blood and soon adopted the pen-name "Shiki" from the Japanese
"hototogisu", the lesser cuckoo, as it was thought that this bird coughs
blood as it sings. Shiki's early tuberculosis worsened after he went to
China as a war correspondent in 1895. He returned to his home town
Matsuyama and convalesced in the home of the famed novelist Natsume
Soseki. During this time he took on disciples and promulgated a style of
haiku that emphasized gaining inspiration from personal experiences of
nature. In 1897 a member of his group established a haiku magazine which
was called Hototogisu after Shiki's pen name - a magazine which today
still is going strong.
In Tokyo Shiki worked as haiku editor for
the newspaper Nippon. Bedridden by 1897, Shiki's disease worsened
further around 1901. He developed Pott's disease and began using
morphine as a painkiller. During this time Shiki wrote diaries and other
autobiographical works, as Bokuju itteki, "A drop of ink," and Byosho
rokushaku, "The 6 foot long sickbed." He died of tuberculosis in 1902 at
age 34.
Clouds Above the Hill is like War and Peace by Tolstoy, a
long novel about warfare with many authorial intrusions and historical
essays. It often reads like a history book, even more so than Shiba
Ryotaro's earlier Ryoma!: The Life of Sakamoto Ryoma Japanese Swordsman and Visionary.
One could say that Meiji-Japan is the real protagonist - the novel is
an exciting portrait of the involvement of three young men in the
frenzied modernization and ascendancy of their country. It is Shiba's
second best selling work in Japanese, with 14,750,000 copies sold. The translation is in 4 volumes.
[Phyllis Birnbaum (Editor), Julia Winters Carpenter (Translator), Paul McCarthy (Translator)]
1969
U.S. Apollo spacecraft puts first man on the moon.
(1) Anshitsu ("The Dark Room") by Yoshiyuki Junnosuke (winner of the Tanizaki Prize).
The 44-year-old protagonist, Nakata Shuichi, has his life arranged in a way that suits him ideally. Unmarried since the death of his wife 20 years earlier, he has a number of woman friends always ready to have him drop in for the night. His relationship with these women is casual to the extreme. He avoids all responsibility and all emotional investment. If he misses emotional heights, he also misses emotional depths. However, things change... His woman friends disappear one after the other, due to marriage, or a stay abroad, etc. Left is only Natsue, a former prostitute. Restricted to one woman, he finds himself hovering on the edge of that hateful involvement which we might also call love. The "dark room" is the metaphor Yoshiyuki uses for that condition.
[tr. John Bester]
1970
Expo '70 opens in Osaka.
Automatic renewal of the United States-Japan Security Treaty.
Hijacking of Japan Airlines Flight 351 by the Japanese Communist League-Red Army Faction
Death of Mishima Yukio, by his own hand (1925-1970). Novelist Mishima Yukio leads his private ultra-nationalist group Tate no Kai in an attempt to provoke an uprising by Ground Self Defense Forces; failing, he commits ritual suicide.
[Mishima Yukio, 1970]
(1) Mishima Yukio writes Tennin gosui ("The Decay of the Angel," lit. "The Five Marks of an Angel's Decay"), thereby finishing his tetralogy The Sea of Fertility. He turns in the manuscript to his publisher on the morning of his seppuku.
Set in the first half of the 1970s, when Honda Shigekuni is an old man. Honda adopts a teenage orphan, Yasunaga Toru, whom he believes to be his dead school friend Kiyoaki's third successive reincarnation. Toru himself is also convinced that a special destiny awaits him because of a mysterious birthmark under his arm. But surprisingly for a lawyer, Honda does not verify whether Toru was indeed born after the death of the Thai princess, and he remains in doubt whether Toru is a genuine incarnation or a false one. Honda gives Toru a good education, but the boy never shows any gratitude. He is calculating and deceitful and likes to humiliate Honda. The woman who was the lover of the Thai princess in the previous volume (and who is still a good friend of Honda) brutally analyzes Toru's character and tells him he is a fake and will lead a long and uneventful life. This shocks Toru so much that he takes poison, but it does not kill but blind him. He lives on, cared for by a crazy woman who bears his child, and shows the five signs of decay of an angel: the flowers about him are withered; he perspires freely; his body gives off a foul odor; his clothes are dirty; and he has lost his place in the world. Obviously, he was a false reincarnation - the spell has worked out. In the last pages of the novel, Honda visits Satoko, the lover of Kiyoaki, now aged like himself, in her nunnery in Nara. To his surprise she insists she has never heard of Kiyoaki and suggests Kiyoaki must be a figment of Honda's imagination! The whole machinery of reincarnation that Mishima had set up so laboriously in the previous volumes, especially in The Temple of Dawn, is hereby negated. The novel ends in Buddhist emptiness, if not Western nihilism: Honda gazes at the still and empty temple garden and realizes he has come to a place that has "no memories, nothing." Unreality is the ultimate truth of the world (if Mishima would have taken his own medicine, there would have been no reason for his suicide). Although the story in this fourth volume is not fully developed, as if Mishima wrote it in great haste, the final pages contain some of the most sublime passages he wrote.
[tr. Edward Seidensticker]
(2) Furui Yoshikichi wins the 64th Akutagawa Prize for the novella Yoko, the story of a sensitive young man's relationship with the title character, a beautiful young woman who is suffering from an apparently hereditary mental illness.
Through Yoko's vivid but distorted perceptions of the world, Furui highlights the process by which reality and identity are created. Above all, however, Yoko is a touching, if somewhat unusual, tale of a young couple's deepening love.
[tr. Donna George Storey in Child of Darkness, Michigan]
Furui Yoshikichi (1937 - 2020) was educated at the University of Tokyo where he majored in German Literature. He was especially interested in modern authors as Hermann Broch and Robert Musil, whose work he has translated into Japanese. He wroked as a professor of Gemrna literature at Kanazawa and Rikkyo universities before in 1970 deciding to devote himself exclusively to creative work. Furui creates subtle and mysterious psychological worlds, infused with a somber poetry. He is an exemplar of the "introverted generation." He has won the Akutagawa Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, and the Yomiuri Prize, among other literary awards. Translations of his work include, besides the above mentioned Yoko, White-Haired Melody and Ravine.
1971
Revaluation of the yen depresses the Japanese economy.
The first McDonald's outlet opens on the Ginza in Tokyo.
Death of Shiga Naoya (1883-1971). Death of Uchida Hyakken (1889–1971).
The ashes of Mishima Yukio are stolen from his tomb, but found back a few months later.
(1) Reite Senki ("The Battle for Leyte Island") is a historical war novel by Ooka Shohei.
The lengthy novel was based on exhaustive research and the compilation of an enormous amount of information over a period of many years. The novel faithfully details the personal and collective experience of battle, deprivation, and loss, and clarifies who and what was ultimately responsible for defeat. Ooka draws attention to the outstanding obligations owed to the war dead and suggests that they can be fulfilled by public confrontation, learning the lessons of defeat, and using them to rectify lingering social and political evils.
In 1944 Ooka had been drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army, was given only three months of rudimentary training, and then sent to the front line at Mindoro Island in the Philippines, where he served as his battalion's communications technician until his battalion was routed and numerous men were killed. In January 1945, he was captured by American forces and sent to a prisoner of war camp on Leyte Island. Survival was very traumatic for Ooka, who was troubled that he, a middle-aged and, to his way of thinking, unworthy soldier, had survived when so many others had not. He suffered for many years from "survivor trauma" and it was only by writing Fires on the Plain (1951) and The Battle of Leyte Island that he came to terms with his own war experiences. As with all his writing, Ooka observes war critically from the perspective of a person who, despite ethical reservations, was forced to serve.
[No translation]
(2) Hakkodasan shi no hoko ("Death March on Mt Hakkoda") by Nitta Jiro.
A popular novel about a military training mission gone tragically wrong. 210 soldiers
ascend Mount Hakkoda in the dead of winter and only eleven return. The training was undertaken in 1902 in preparation for the coming war
against Russia - the expected combat in Siberia made severe winter exercises necessary. The disaster was due to a confused chain of command and the failure of the top to communicate with their staff. Nitta Jiro (1912–80), who was a trained meteorologist and often wrote about the mountains and the dangers of changing weather conditions, carefully researched the novel, throwing light an a disaster that had for many years had been a taboo topic. The novel was filmed in 1977.
[tr. James Westerhoven]
1972
Red Army faction incidents: 2 policemen are killed during the arrest, subsequent interrogations reveal 14 other murders committed by faction members in the course of internal disputes. 24 die in a Japanese Red Army attack on Lod Airport in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Okinawa returned to Japanese sovereignty by the U.S.
China-Japan Joint Communique announces the establishment of diplomatic relations between Japan and the People's Republic of China.
Winter Olympics held in Sapporo, Hokkaido.
Death of Kawabata Yasunari, probably by his own hand (1899-1972).
(1) Mizukara waga namida wo nuguitamau hi ("The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away") by Oe Kenzaburo.
A novella which forms a critical response to Mishima's fanatical suicide and ideology, and at the same time Oe's definitive statement on the role of the emperor in Japanese society. The protagonist is a 35-year old writer who tries to deal with his past, which lies beneath the doom of events from WWII. He may or may not be dying of a
serious illness, but anyhow has retreated to a hospital bed, where, donning green
goggles, he dictates what he calls "a history of the age." Seated at the sickbed, the note-taker, who could be
his wife or a nurse, writes down what the sick and dying man wants to leave as a
will. His thoughts and attempts at remembering mainly focus on his father, an
exponent of extreme emperor worship, and the mother, whose father has been
put to death for high treason against the emperor - a shame from which
her son ultimately cannot escape. The "history of the age" is the center of the story: the
narrator's father's attempt, on the last day of the war, to lead an
uprising to "save the emperor." This mad rebellion clearly echoes what
Oe considered to be Mishima's distortion of Japanese values. The climax of
the story of the insurrection is a grotesque parody of Mishima's bloody
coup and his belief in the beauty of violence.
[tr. John Nathan, in the collection Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness]
(2) Kokotsu no hito ("The Twilight Years", lit. "Senile People") by Ariyoshi Sawako.
The difficulties of caring the sick or demented aged has become a rather common theme in today's Japan, but when Ariyoshi wrote this novel 50 years ago nobody saw the future coming. Another important theme of this novel is the role of women in Japan, as they were/are de facto expected to be caretakers of elderly parents or grandparents. The Tachibana are an ordinary family. Akiko lives with her husband Nobutoshi, her son Satoshi, her stepfather Shigezo and her stepmother. After the death of the last one, the physical and mental state of Shigezo quickly deteriorate - at the beginning of the book he is found in his underwear on a wintry street. Tachibana Akiko is a busy woman who not only takes care of the household, but also has a job outside the family. Her senile father-in-law means another domestic chore for her. When she turns to social services, no help is offered. On the contrary, she is blamed for not honoring the
traditional Confucian precept of filial piety. She is forced to quit her
job to take full-time care of the old man. Ariyoshi calls attention to the social difficulties
encountered in particular by women, traditionally assigned to household
chores and to assisting older members of families. In addition, through
her meticulous descriptions of the personal (physical and
psychological), family and social consequences of aging, the writer shows her readers the agonizing prospect of a
painful end of life. When Ariyoshi wanted to donate the money she had earned with this book to financial support for care facilities for the elderly, she came into conflict with the tax administration which used to impose heavy taxes and limits on
private donations. The rules regarding charitable donations have since been relaxed. Ariyoshi correctly
anticipated the problems that Japan's rapidly aging society would cause.
But the novel is not at all a dreary story - it is both funny and heart-warming.
[tr. Mildred Tahara]
(3) Tatta hitori no hanran ("A Singular Rebellion") by Muraya Saiichi, winner of the Tanizaki prize.
A comedy of manners which has not fared well in translation as the subdued humor of Muraya is difficult to translate. The narrator, Mabuchi Eisuke, is a middle-aged widower and employee of an electronics manufacturer, a job he has because, as a civil servant at Ministry of Economic Affairs, he refused a transfer to the Ministry of Defense. This seems something of a rebellion against authority, but in reality Mabuchi's motives are mixed. The story starts with Mabuchi marrying his much younger fashion model mistress,
Yukari. This is a small rebellion, too, and the various confused situations which arise in their life together form the comic center of the novel. Even more so as Yukari brings her grandmother who has just been released from prison as she has (accidentally?) killed her estranged husband with a razor. The novel about small private rebellions is set against the background of the
rebellious year of 1969 when rioting students seemed poised to
overthrow society.
[tr. Dennis Keene]
Darkness in Summer by Kaiko Takeshi, is a touching novel about Vietnam,
Kaiko also wrote the reportage Into a Black Sun about that same war.
(4) "Momo" ("Peaches"), a short story by Abe Akira.
Born
in Hiroshima, Akira Abe (1934-1989) studied around the same time as Oe
Kenzaburo French literature at the University of Tokyo. After graduating
in 1959, he worked as a television and radio director at TBS until he
began his career as a professional writer in 1971. His literary career
began in 1962 with the publication of The Children's Room (Kodomobeya),
an emotional account of growing up with a mentally challenged older
brother. Almost all of his stories are autobiographical and based on
events from his own life and the lives of his family. Abe
Akira is one of the representatives of the "Shishosetsu". His most important novel is Vacation for Eternity (Shirei no kyuka) from 1970, deals with the military's loss of
authority in the post-war period, which particularly affected his
father. Abe is also a master of short stories. Very little by Abe Akira has been translated into English.
The short story "Momo", "Peaches," has appeared in several anthologies. It is a tale in which the author questions his memory, which is the most fundamental source of his art as Shishosetsu novelist.
[tr. Jay Rubin in Contemporary Japanese Literature]
[Reference works used: Dawn to the West by Donald Keene (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984); Modern Japanese Novelists, A Biographical Dictionary by John Lewell (New York, Tokyo and London: Kodansha International, 1993); Narrating the Self, Fictions of Japanese Modernity by Tomi Suzuki (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); Oe and Beyond, Fiction in Contemporary Japan, ed. by Stephen Snyder and Philip Gabriel (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999); Origins of Modern Japanese Literature by Karatani Kojin (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993); The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature, 2 vols, ed. by J. Thomas Rimer and Van C. Gessel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005 and 2007); The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature by Susan J. Napier (London and New York: Routledge, 1996); Writers & Society in Modern Japan by Irena Powell (New York, Tokyo and London: Kodansha International, 1983).]
[All photos public domain from Wikimedia Commons]
Modern Japanese Fiction by Year Index