Paper short abstract:

The purpose of this presentation is to reconsider, through the voices of "minor" modernists, the situation of Japanese literature in the era of an "emergency" after the Manchurian Incident and the suppression of proletarian literature.

Paper long abstract:

The Japanese literary revival (bungei fukko) movement since 1933 coincides with the period of controversy over land, such as "hometown" or "region." This confirms the connection with nationalism, and leads to the fact that Yojuro Yasuda, a Japan Romantic School critic, published “Literature of the Lost Land” (1934), responded to Hideo Kobayashi's famous critique "Literature of the Lost Home" (1933), to develop his idea that is linked to "Japanese lineage.” At the same time, modernists, whose decline was pointed out by Kobayashi, also pursued literary possibilities over the land. For example, Yukio Haruyama published "New Regionalist Novel Theory" (1934) in the magazine Action. The "regionalism" here is not only deeply related to peasant literature, but also the problem of the center and the provinces, based on the introduction of Provençal literature in France. Besides, this issue is connected to the framework of the "local color" in imperial Japan, and "regionalism" was also being explored by Japanese writers living in Taiwan. It was also during this period that Taku Oshika, who would come to prominence with his novel The Savage (1935), published his writings on Taiwanese aborigines in Action. These trends, which can be said to have differentiated into nationalism and colonialism, have a very similar character when viewed from the perspective of exoticism based on the longing for and beautification of the primitive. While the former goes back in time to empathize with the ancient ancestors and listen to their voices, the latter yearns for a spatially distant place and listens to the voice of the wild within. Based on the above, Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country, which was serialized in 1935, can be considered as a kind of exoticism and Japanese taste obtained by passing through a Western perspective, as well as "local" literature set in Echigo-Yuzawa, and as one of the problems faced by modernist literature in the mid-1930s. The purpose of this presentation is to reconsider, through the voices of "minor" modernists, the situation of Japanese literature in the era of an "emergency" after the Manchurian Incident and the suppression of proletarian literature.