The History of the Reception of James Joyce in Japan

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  • 日本におけるジェイムズ・ジョイスの受容 (二)
  • 日本におけるジェイムズ・ジョイスの受容-2-昭和7年から戦時まで
  • ニホン ニ オケル ジェイムズ ジョイス ノ ジュヨウ 2 ショウワ 7ネン
  • from 1932 to the Wartime
  • 昭和7年から戦時まで

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Abstract

James Joyce, who first became popular among the Japanese as the author of Ulysses, attracted attention of the younger generation of Japanese writers and scholars by its extraordinary technique, “the stream of consciousness”. Along with the rapid rise of the journalism, the interest in it developed into a big literary movement called “the new psychological literature”. Its supporters asserted that the method is the very apparatus which explore the new field of the contemporary Japanese literature. The enthusiasm for the technique of Ulysses is chiefly due to the reaction to the ideological proletarian and Marxist literature. In addition to that, that kind of literature depends too much upon the material just as that of the Taisho era did. In the peak of the movement stated above, two Japanese translations of Ulysses were published. The epoch-making event caused the intellectuals to discuss Joyce's literature from more extensive and essential points of view. The strong tendency to understand Joyce's literature totally is based on the reflection on the thoughtless craze about it in the past; and such attitude towards Joyce offered the very significant problem accompanied by the meeting of the two different cultures. As Fascism advanced, the pressure of the authorities on the left people grew severe, and Marxist literature fell down little by little; and in its turn rose traditional Japanese literature. It goes without saying that the war structure of the Japanese society prohibited the use of the English language as that of the enemy, and that nothing came to be written or told about either European or American literature including that of James Joyce.

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