One Hundred Years of Solitude and Its Influence in Japan

Abstract

Abstract The Japanese translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude, published in 1972, was a landmark in Japan’s twentieth-century cultural life. From literature to cinema, from drama to anime film, García Márquez’s masterpiece has been hailed as a source for inspiration or as a professional milestone by leading Japanese creators. Authors such as Kenzaburō Ōe (Nobel laureate, 1994), Natsuki Ikezawa, and Kobo Abe openly acknowledged having undergone literary influence from the Colombian writer, while Haruki Murakami scholars point out how magical realism serves as García Márquez’s tool in depicting multiple explanations for a reality populated by traumatized characters. The subsequent Japanese publication of the near-totality of the Colombian Nobel laureate’s oeuvre, moreover, has helped bring into view a great many coincidences between magical realism and the subject matter and techniques of Japanese literary works produced since the end of the nineteenth century, when Japan ended its voluntary isolation and opened itself up to the West. The imprint of García Márquez on Japanese culture brings out parallels between two distant literary traditions that offer a reality different from that of the European, modifying it with magical or animistic elements. The legacy of GGM in cinema is present above all in the animated films of the Ghibli Studio, which submerge the viewer in a reality so palpable that one is induced to unquestioningly accept extravagant or implausible events.