Postwar Japanese Novelists and American Literature

Abstract

Since the country’s decisive defeat through the acceptance of the unconditional surrender in 1945, Japanese novelists have been working in the shadow of America. The American Occupation from 1945 to 1952 set the essential tone of the postwar Japanese chronotope, and authors have had to address their problems through it. Postwar Japanese novelists needed to familiarize themselves with the explicit meaning of the national and ethnic experience of the defeat in the total war. They had to come to terms with the inevitable outcome of being re-incorporated into the international world according to America’s scenario for achieving a new global hegemony. On one hand, this meant severance from the military past and rebirth as a pacifist and capitalist trading country; on the other, it meant disruption of the cultural continuity as a nation and rapid evaporation of the memories of the war crimes. Postwar Japanese novelists have turned to American literature, not only for a usable index for understanding “America” as the most fundamentally decisive element of their postwar chronotope but also for something to stimulate their critical and creative imagination or synchronize with their aesthetic sensitivity during their search for an artistic expression under the shadow of “America.” Three influential Japanese postwar novelists have a specific American writer as his inspirational source: Mark Twain for Kenzaburo Oe (b. 1935–), William Faulkner for Kenji Nakagami (1946–1992), and Raymond Carver for Haruki Murakami (b. 1949–). Their relationships with their literary precursors vary relative to their own sensitivities, political stances, and cultural background including class and caste; however, each of these three Japanese novelists has maintained a wide influence in the postwar Japanese literary climate because each has established his own unique way of addressing the most critical problem of “America.” Each of these writers takes his influence from an American writer and learns his own lessons about how to cope with or navigate through a life under the shadow of “America.” During each decade of postwar Japanese history—Oe from the early 1960s to the late 1970s, Nakagami from the late 1970s to the late 1980s and Murakami from the early 1980s to the 1990s—the authors reflect a gradual change in the shadow of “America” because of a change in America’s policy toward Japan from the end of the occupation through the period of Japan’s astounding economic prosperity, to the end of the Cold War and a gradual attenuation of America’s power over Japan.