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Paper short abstract:

In my paper, I will present Hayashi Fumiko's (1903-1951) diaries from the offensive on the Chinese city of Hankou in 1938. I will analyze both their form and content, examining their place within Hayashi's body of work, as well as within the state propaganda during the Second Sino-Japanese War.

Paper long abstract:

Hayashi Fumiko (1903-1951), one of the most popular writers of her time, seems to be largely forgotten in contemporary discourse on Japanese literature. Having become an overnight sensation with the phenomenal success of her debut novel Hôrôki ("Diary of a Vagabond", 1930), a "poetic diary" chronicling her early years in Tokyo in 1920s, she had built up a persona of an eternal wanderer and a writer coming from the lower strata of Japanese society. Both aspects shaped her reports from the Japanese offensive on the Chinese city of Hankou, published as Sensen ("Battlefront", 1938) and Hokugan butai ("Northern Bank Troops", 1939) - the most prominent records of her activity as a war reporter between 1937 and 1943.

In these two publications, Hayashi revisits the form of a "poetic diary" which brought her fame, ensuring the interest of the contemporary readership. In this pair of diaries, almost identical in content and form, Hayashi recounts her experience from the battlefield, which she traversed with the Japanese soldiers. Employing nationalistic rhetoric, Hayashi remarkably omits the reality of the war itself almost completely, instead focusing on the beauty of the landscape and the virtuousness of the soldiers, who in a way become her temporary family.

In my paper, I will present Hayashi's war diaries within the context of her oeuvre, as well as the contemporary propaganda and war literature. I also intend to disprove Hayashi's status as an apolitical writer and focus on the politically charged messages present within her war diaries, which as of 2016 have become some of her most readily available works in Japan. They thus become a part of the present discourse on Japan's wartime past, marked by a self-positioning of Japan as a war victim and omission of its aggression against China and its colonies. They also provide insight on the influence of wartime politics even with ostentatiously unpolitical writers such as Hayashi.

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Paper short abstract:

The tenkô novel is considered a form of the autobiographical I-novel genre. I reevaluate this understanding by examining the dialogic relation between Dostoyevsky's and Murayama Tomoyoshi's "White Nights" and analyzing the novella's polyphonic narrative structure.

Paper long abstract:

In May 1934, Murayama Tomoyoshi, a representative artist and writer in both the avant-garde art and proletarian theatre movements, published the work "White Nights" (Byakuya). This novella has been recognized as the first "tenkô novel," the emerging genre comprised of works mostly written by proletarian writers who had committed tenkô (ideological recantation); Murayama had recanted his leftist political views in order to be released from prison in December 1933.

"White Nights" focuses on the relationship of a socialist named Kano with his wife Noriko during the period prior to his arrest and his release. This novella is characterized by its biting and humorous depiction of the protagonist's egotism. It was apparent to readers of the time that this was Murayama's self-portrait. Because of its autobiographical elements, this text has been discussed as a variation of the "I-novel" genre, and other tenkô novels have been considered similarly.

However, "White Nights" has many aspects that do not fully fit into the concept of "I-novel." For example, the only first-person narrator ("I") in this novella is Noriko, who criticizes Kano's egotism and confesses her love for their comrade to him over the one-fourth pages of the whole text. Further, it can be read as an adaptation of Dostoevsky's "Belye noči," which was first translated in 1920 in Japan under the very same title, "Byakuya." In this story, a "dreamer" living in St. Petersburg falls in unrequired love with a girl who waits her fiancé to come back from Moscow on a white night. Dostoevsky wrote this romance in 1848 when he sympathized with utopian socialism while connected to the famous Petrashevsky circle.

The purpose of my paper is to, by analyzing Murayama's "White Nights," consider the "tenkô novel" from an alternate perspective than the usual "I-novel" frame. To do so, I will discuss the dialogic characteristics of this text by exploring the voice of Noriko and by demonstrating its relation to Dostoevsky's "White Nights."

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Paper short abstract:

By focusing on the historical and intellectual role of the Minyūsha, this paper will show the revolutionary origin of Kunikida Doppo's writing. The Minyūsha's and Doppo's view of writing as a form of political engagement acutely challenges the commonly assumed separation of politics and literature.

Paper long abstract:

The promulgation of the Meiji Constitution in 1889, two decades after the Meiji Ishin, symbolically represented the end of the politically tumultuous period and signalled the beginning of a time for settlement. The Freedom and People's Rights Movement that had so contested the Meiji government disappeared altogether as the Constitution realised the movement's main goal of opening the Diet. However, as the social order became solidified and the possibilities for further changes quickly diminishing, Japanese youth found themselves politically powerless, and many retreated to interiority and literature, thus, the narrative goes, the emergence of modern Japanese literature. This contextualisation of Japan's modern literature during this period has forced the separation of politics and literature. In short, literature has been dismissed as a turn away from the political reality. Hence, from historians' point of view, literary writers in general have had little relevance in modern Japanese history.

This paper makes an argument for the historical and intellectual significance of Meiji writer Kunikida Doppo which inevitably accompanies an alteration of the conventional narrative that has ordered the existing historical knowledge of modern Japanese literature. In order to illustrate that young Doppo's commitment to writing had much historical relevance, this chapter will re-examine the historical context by focusing on the role of the Minyūsha - the publisher and the creator of Kokumin no tomo, the most influential magazine at the time - in calling for a 'second revolution' to realise the revolutionary ideals of the Ishin. It will be demonstrated that the political vibrancy and turmoil of pre-1890 did not simply cease to exist but changed the form from a direct political action to journalism and literature. The fact that the Minyūsha regarded writing as a form of political engagement which focussed on individual readers and their state of mind critically challenges the commonly assumed separation of politics and literature. This paper culminates in Doppo's search of a model for his writing which ultimately arrived on the Russian literature through Futabatei Shimei's works. This too was a statement of his intent to effect the transformation of society through writing.