Re-reading Tokuno-Goro-no-seikatsu-to-iken(<Special Issue>Is There Something Like "Literature of the 1940s"?)

Izu Toshihiko

doi:10.20620/nihonbungaku.52.11_1

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Other Title

よみがえる「得能五郎の生活と意見」 : 激動する歴史のただ中に〈現在〉を生きる(<特集>「一九四〇年代文学」は可能か)
よみがえる「得能五郎の生活と意見」--激動する歴史のただ中に〈現在〉を生きる
ヨミガエルトクノウゴロウノセイカツトイケンゲキドウスルレキシノタダナカニゲンザイオイキル

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In Tokuno-Goro-no-seikatsu-to-iken, Sei Ito depicted the life of a Japanese intellectual in Paris who had no courage to face realities, felt strong anxiety about the future, and clung to his petit bourgeois happiness when Germany was about to invade France and conquer the capital. The intellectual named Goro Tokuno could not but feel helpless because his philosophical and literary knowledge seemed to be nothing in front of cruel realities. Covered with a giant wave of the war and lost in the impersonal process of history, he desperately tried to recover himself and find some way-out in literature. In a sense, we can find our own fate in Goro's anguish and struggle, because we now live in situations almost as critical as those in wartime. In this age of unsteadiness it is worth re-reading the text.

Journal

Japanese Literature

Japanese Literature 52 (11), 1-10, 2003

Japanese Literature Association