The Description Of Man And The Sea In Kaijin-maru

Yaeko Nogami(1885-1985)was a famous humanist and realistic female writer in modern Japan.With the help of Natsume Sōseki,she published her first novel Fate(1907),and then officially entered the literary world.In her nearly 80 years of literary writing career,she has gone through the social upheaval of Meiji,Taisho and Showa times in Japan.During this period,she has always adhered to rationality and conscience,and created a large number of literary works that are close to the social reality but with the different characteristics of the times,and won many literary awards and honorary titles.Yaeko Nogami has worked tirelessly all her life and created a series of literary classics.Among them,the first work that made her famous in the literary world was the novella Kaijin-maru published in 1922.It is the work that is regarded by many scholars as her transformation and leap from "boudoir writer" to humanitarian and realistic writer.Since then,her creative vision has shifted from family to social reality,her writing techniques have changed from objective sketching to realism,and her creative ideas tend to be revolutionary.When she reviewed this work in the future,she said "that novella may be the earliest decent novel I have written ",which shows its important significance in the author’s literary career.Kaijin-maru is a work adapted from the prototype of "Takayoshi-maru shipwreck" which happened in her hometown.It is a masterpiece of collision between historical reality and literary fiction.As a tragedy happened on the sea,the novel takes the sea as the background and the boat as the place of activity.It mainly tells the story of four male seamen with different images and personalities who were stranded on the sea for more than 50 days after they were hit by storms on the way of carrying goods by the cargo ship "Kaijin-maru".In the novel,the author constructs a world in which man and the sea are closely intertwined,and shows the two-way interaction between man and the sea.On the one hand,the sailors on the way are facing the problem of fighting against the bad sea conditions,and their humanity is facing the test.The author adds the bold idea that the starving crew tries to kill their companion cruelly(not yet implemented),and depicts the inner monologue and psychological struggle of the characters.On the other hand,the sea is not only a scene but also a character,a sentimental,spiritual and intelligent existence.The author has developed a lot of detailed description of the sea,endowed the ocean with fresh vitality,changeable personality and gorgeous mythological color,and created the image of the sea that can test,redeem and surpass human beings.In the novel,man and the sea are in harmony and set off each other,revealing the essence of human nature and writing the magnificent color of the ocean.This paper takes Kaijin-maru as the research object.first of all,it reads the text carefully to find out the relevant content of the description of seamen and the sea.On this basis,take the text analysis method to analyze the character image and ocean image in the text.In the analysis,from a macro point of view,combined with the social background,historical and cultural background,the writer’s growth experience and other elements,through the interpretation of the metaphor of reality under the surface language symbols,this paper further investigates Yaeko Nogami’s rational thinking of human nature,her complex feelings for the ocean,and her deep understanding of the relationship between man and the sea,so as to grasp the content and ideological core of Kaijin-maru as a whole.