Memories of World War II: Victimization and guilt in the fiction of Mishima, Oe, Grass, and Boel

This dissertation explores the memory of victimization and complicity with various forms of Imperialist aggression before and during World War II through the comparison of two Japanese postwar novels with two German ones. The similarities in political and literary histories before and after the war in the two countries are the bases of my study. The Japanese novels to be discussed are Mishima Yukio's Kinkakuji (1956) (Temple of the Golden Pavilion), and Oe Kenzaburo's Mizukara Waga Namida o Nuguitamauhi (1971) (The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away). The German novels are Heinrich Boll's Billard um Halbzehn (1959) (Billiards at Half Past Nine), and Gunter Grass's Die Blechtrommel (1959) (The Tin Drum).;As a comparative study, this dissertation investigates these four Japanese and German authors' diametrically opposed perspectives of victimization and guilt as expressed in their novels. Their experiences differing during the war is the key to understanding their contrasting views.;As a literary technique, the forms chosen by the four authors express their works' contents and their authors' views of history. In this regard, Oe and Grass resemble each other. By using the similar literary techniques of defamiliarization and the V-effect, both Oe and Grass create grotesque worlds that do not permit readers to identify with their characters. In other words, "distanced" narratives develop a certain relationship between reader and text so that the readers are induced to reexamine their political views. On the other hand, Mishima and Boll are both diametrically opposed to Oe and Grass. By focusing on their characters' psychological processes, Mishima and Boll, in their Manichean world view, present their destructive acts as inevitable during the eternal struggle between good and evil.;The Introduction details the four authors' experiences during the war in order to explain how the overwhelming past affected them. Focusing on Oe's and Mishima's contrasting views of the Emperor system, Chapter 1, the Japanese section, examines the perspective of the victim. Japanese are victims of the Emperor system for Oe, but of the Emperor's humanization for Mishima. Chapter 2, the German section, concentrates on Grass's and Boll's feelings of guilt and of responsibility for Nazi Germany and the incomplete past. The final chapter compares Oe with Grass, and Mishima with Boll on the basis of their artistic forms and themes, and recapitulates how the war has left its traces on each author.