The Japanese Novel and Disengagement

Abstract

It has been reported by an eminent literary critic that shortly before the novelist Takami Junl died, in the summer of 1965, he expressed a wish to die as a member of the communist party. More than one important Japanese writer has made an improbable deathbed revelation about himself; but this one seemed more improbable than most. In his last years, Takami's influence, less as a novelist than as an important member of the literary establishment, had seemed generally anti-communist. But once the first surprise wore off, the news came to seem not improbable at all. Takami was born in I907, and he was a child of his age. In the years when he was a university student, Russianinspired radicalism was having its last fling and the decade of the militarists and the assassinations was in sight. He was active in the proletarian literary movement. Like many comrades in that movement, he presently went to prison. He emerged some months later a 'reformed man'. (The Japanese word tenkosha, of which this is an attempt at translation, carries a suggestion of'turncoat'.) The work with which, upon his release, he established himself as an author is in some ways like Mary McCarthy's most widely read book. The 'group' of ex-proletarians it describes is a forlorn and demoralized one, given over to commercialism and carnal indulgence and self-derision now that its guiding star has been lost. The signs were there all along, and need not have caused surprise when, in Takami's last days, they came into the open. He was like many other intellectuals of his time and circumstances: the 'reform' had not been right, and the injury to his conscience never healed; there had not been enough resistance, the decision to change had come too easily. Although there was one convenient