Vacantness And Sadness Of The "ruins Generation" In Postwar Japan

Takeshi Kaiko was born during World War I and grew up in the postwar eraand the period of rapid economic growth in Japan. His life experiences during thesethree eventful periods help to form his core views on life as a whole. Most of hisliterary works are reflections of the real life, condemning contemporary social evils.As one of the representatives of the Social School, Kaiko targets the subjects andcontents of his novels more on their significance to the society. He focused hisattention on people struggling on social margin, depicting their arduous and fragilelife and exploring its meaning. Putting Kaiko and his literary texts against thebackdrop of Japan s development toward modernization in the postwar period andthe above-mentioned three eventful periods, this thesis, from different levels andperspectives, explores and interprets the interaction between Kaiko s literary viewsand Japan s postwar society, even the situations of the world. To make the analyseseasy, this thesis breaks the postwar Japanese history into1950s,1960s,1970s and1980s and expounds, through close reading of the Kaiko s literary texts, thesignificance of his social criticism. In his early works, Kaiko s concerns focus onyoung intellectuals unwilling acceptance of the fact of being defeated in the war,and their confusion in their survival in the empty and chaotic postwar society.During Japan s turn from the postwar ruins to rapid economic growth, Kaikoperceptively sensed the changes of common people in their subsistenceconsciousness and their values. His novels, Panic, The Giant and the Doll, amongothers, criticize phenomena emerging from rapid economic growth, such as man sestrangement, solitude and alienation, and discuss the social and economic sourcesfor those phenomena. During the period of rapid economic growth, common peoplehave to face heavy life pressure and survival is their top priority. In addition, thedevelopment of individual subjectivity is seriously restricted and handicapped. Theself, which regained freedom, is again jeopardized for being incorporated into highly institutionalized and bureaucratic society. To explore the meaning ofindividual life, Kaiko started his expedition. He endangered his life and went tothe battlefield of the Vietnam War and he wrote a series of novels concerning the war,such as Notes on the Vietnam War, Glaring Darkness, The Shadow in the Summer,etc. His ideal shipwrecked on the cruel facts of the Vietnam War. Back in Japan, themodernization had almost been accomplished and the society was about to enter theera of mass consumerism. To resist the negative influence of the deconstruction ofauthoritative meaning in the consumer society and to quest for the lost meaning, eversince the second half of1970s, Kaiko travelled around the world, fishing, huntingand adventuring. He insisted on taking as the starting point of literary creation thereal life experience and thoughts about it. He wrote a series of travel books aboutfishing and adventuring, which have become the cultural codes of modern society forthe mass to resist standardization, unification and homogenization. Viewed as awhole, Kaiko, whether in Panic, The Giant and the Doll, Notes on the Exile in theearly period, or in Notes on the Vietnam War, Glaring Darkness, The Shadow in theSummer, Opa in the middle period, always promptly sensed the crises in the societyand wrote novels about them. Kaiko Takeshi, as one of the ruin generation, wasborn during the war, and grew up in the modern era when the meaning of life isquestioned and probed. He spent his life exploring the meaning of life, but whenaged, he experienced the loss of that meaning and the deconstruction of grandhistoric narrative. This is Kaiko s own sorrow in his individual life and the sorrow ofruin generation as a whole.