전흔세대(焼け跡世代) 소년의 전쟁 ─오에 겐자부로(大江健三郎)의 『사육(飼育)』을 중심으로─

Abstract

“Shiiku”(1958) by Kenzaburo Oe(1935∼) won the Akutagawa Prize, a major literary award. The story has a valley village in the background and a setting at around the end of World War II. The main character and narrator is a boy, who was not directly influenced by the war and spent his days being bored. However, one day, an enemy fighter made a forced landing on the mountain, and its black soldier was caught as a prisoner by the adults in the village. The boy initially felt embarrassed about the attitude of his father toward the black soldier, who considered him a beast, but he gradually began to have a human relationship with him through living together. However, when escorting the black soldier to town, the relationship with him broke, and the boy’s father slaughtered black soldier with a hatchet. “Shiiku” has been recognized as having a mythical structure that is symbolics, figurative, and stylistic. However, the perceptions of the Burn-mark generations who was raised during the war have been overlooked, despite it being a War Novel. Nevertheless the change in the boy’s perspective on the black soldier, i.e., “beast ⇒ livestock ⇒ friend ⇒ family ⇒ beast ⇒ enemy”, and the smell of a corpse shows the Burn-mark generation’s confusions and intense memories of the war.