Paper short abstract:

This paper examines ways in which Japanese postwar poetry describes the experience of total war, focusing on Ayukawa Nobuo and Arechi (The Waste Land) group.Ayukawa treated the war period as a material to think about fanatic totalitarianism, and I attempt to clarify the uniqueness of his works.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines ways in which Japanese postwar poetry describes the experience of total war, focusing particularly on Ayukawa Nobuo and Arechi (The Waste Land) group. Generally, Arechi group, representing postwar poetry, expressed bitter experience as war "survivors." Ayukawa, the central figure of Arechi, is said to have composed poems as an "executor" for the war dead. Notably, as the phrase "100 million Gyokusai (honorable deaths for all Japanese)" suggests, Japan, then suffering from abnormal spiritualism, did not envision the possibility of living in a postwar period, regardless of whether on the battlefield or the home front; this was especially true of the younger generation. Previous studies have highlighted the pain of war in postwar poetry, but none have questioned how the image of the "extinction of everything related to oneself" was perceived and transferred after the war. In my opinion, Ayukawa Nobuo pursued the meaning of the national total war experience; however, doing so was actually rare among other postwar poets. For example, Tamura Ryuichi, another Arechi poet, in the poetry collection ' Four Thousand Days and Nights' (1956), likens the war period to the myth of floods. Similarly, many poems from the early postwar period use mythological metaphors to describe the survival of war's oppression. In contrast, Ayukawa never described the war period as an abstract trial but as Japan's specific situation wherein the country had fallen into fanatic totalitarianism, as in ' if there is tomorrow' (1956). This difference is significant in considering Japanese postwar poetry as "poetry that thinks." Therefore, in this paper, I attempt to clarify the uniqueness and significance of Ayukawa's idea of "after war" as "after death" through two comparisons, namely, between Arechi group and the other poetic group during the early postwar period and between Ayukawa and other Arechi poets.