Paper short abstract:

This paper aims at analyzing the relationship between Mishima Yukio and Takahashi Kazumi's texts and highlight the similarities and differences between both writers in their relationship to politics, identity and commitment. I will focus my analysis on two novels published in 1969.

Paper long abstract:

Jean-François Lyotard contends that the key feature of the postmodern condition is the absence of collective narrative. Whereas modernity is characterized by the preeminence of shared ideologies, postmodernity is a depoliticized era in which economic growth and materialism arose as sole common values. In Japan, the 1960s is often considered a shifting point. According to various historians of thought, such as Oguma Eiji, it is indeed during that period that public opinion gradually became disengaged with politics.

In that respect, novelists Mishima Yukio and Takahashi Kazumi could be considered as some of the very last ideological writers in Japan. The former advocated a return to the ultranationalists' ideals of pre-war Japan, while the latter was viewed as the literary voice of Maoist students at the end of the 1960s. However, in their fictions, they both promoted a paradoxical view of political action, suggesting that commitment was closely related to simulacrum and nihilism. In their views, commitment seems to be an existential issue, more than a political one.

Though the kinship between Mishima Yukio and Takahashi Kazumi has already been mentioned, no comparative literary study of both writers has been published until now. I wish to present some of my initial reflection in order to fill this gap. I will first analyze the relationship between Mishima and Takahashi's texts and their context and then highlight the similarities as well as the difference between both writers in their relationship to politics and commitment.

My analysis will be focused on two novels: Honba (Runaway Horses) by Mishima Yukio and Daraku (The Fall) by Takahashi Kazumi. Both novels were published in 1969 and illustrate the ambiguous relationships of their authors to Commitment.