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Modern Japanese Prose Narrative

HISTORICAL CONFLICTS IN THE MODERN JAPANESE PROSE NARRATIVE

This paper examines one of the most striking examples of the battle which every society, culture, and civilization inevitably fights with its individual members. Each configuration which involves more than one single human being sets up an inevitable conflict between the separate participants and the group as a whole. Nowhere is this more dramatically demonstrated than in the ferocious struggle that characterized Japan's domestic history during the early part of the twentieth century. The battle engaged every member of society, and this study analyzes one of the bloodiest battlefields of all: the literary one. Shimazaki Toson's The Broken Commandment and Natsume Soseki's Kokoro stand in for their nation's struggle to decide how far an individual's choices and compelling need to join an unfamiliar "modern world" can go before they obliterate everything that defines Japan itself. James Fujii, in Complicit Fictions, argues that "texts constitute history." As the conflict of these novels demonstrates, he could not be more right.

Until the mid-1800s, the Japanese had succeeded in sustaining a complex, entrenched, formalized way of living that left little room for self-determination or individual change--or even for its members to consider that they could make such choices. Then, suddenly, Japan's radical collision with the West forced the society as a whole to choose. Under Emperor Meiji, Japan was strong-armed into the modern age. Kenneth Pyle writes, "Though this revolution upon which the Meiji leadership embarked in 1868 saved Japan from national disaster such as was experienced nearly everywhere else in Asia, it exacted a fearful cost in historical and cultural dislocation, and thus in psychological strain" (3).

Throughout the West, rapid social and economic changes were reflected in each culture's arts. Fujii observes how literature and the humanities refl...

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Modern Japanese Prose Narrative. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 20:57, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1692343.html