A Comparative Study Of Japanese Images Centered On A Passage Of Life And A Choice Of Evils

Images of Japan have been eagerly created by Chinese and Western writers. It has been nearly70years since Sino-Japanese War ended. Compared with the literature during the war, the images of Japan developed further. This paper focuses on the images of Japanese between You Fengwei’s A Passage of Life and Meira Chand’s A Choice of Evils and tries to dig into the nature of politics and culture behind these images of Japanese. This paper will use the Imagology and Parallel Comparison of Comparative Literature to analyze the images of Japanese which appear in the two novels. In addition, this paper tries to find out how the politics and culture of the two writers influence their creating of the images of Japanese.This paper is divided into the following five parts. The first part is "Introduction", which gives a brief introduction of the two novels, briefly reviews and research purpose and significance, and the structure of this paper as well. The second part is "Positive Images of Japanese", which focuses on the two positive images in A Passage of Life and A Choice of Evils. The former fights for righteous while the latter for freedom. Through comparison, this paper finds out the reason why the two writers created their respective positive images based on Ideology. The third part is "Negative Images of Japanese", which interprets the negative images created by the two writers from Japanese military officers and Japanese soldiers. This part talks about the similarities between the officers and soldiers, and differences between the two officers in the two novels. The fourth part is "Background of Politics, History and Literature" Different politics and cultures affect the construction of the images of Japanese. The fifth part is "Conclusion", which summarizes the whole paper.This paper analyzes the different images of Japanese created by the two writers who come from different countries, and compares the positive and negative images of Japanese during Sino-Japanese War. These two writers followed their collective imagination for images of Japanese during the war. Both of them created ferocious and contemptible Japanese. Meanwhile, the two writers also construct positive images based on Ideology according to their respective political and cultural background.