‘大東亜’ 談論と日本帝国の文学場 ­ ― 大東亜文学賞と芥川賞を中心に ―­

Abstract

The Great Eastern Asian Writers Conventions (GEAWC) of 1941~1944, which mobilized Japanese and gaichi writers on a large scale through writers’ collaboration with the military authorities, presented a rare situation in Japanese history. The GEAWC epitomized the extreme extrinsic focus of Japanese literature during the ten year Shōwa period (Shōwa-jyunendai-nihobungaku). The impetus behind this phenomenon was the desired integration of the gaichi literary sphere into the naichi. The first Great Eastern Asian Literature (GEALP) Prize was awarded at the second GEAWC in 1943 in Tokyo; no first place prize was awarded. There were six second place winners. Prize winning works by Japanese authors were Shoji Sōichi’s The wife of Chen (chinhujin) and Ōki Atsuo’s Sing in the Vast Sea (unabarade-utaeru)”. The other winners were Shijun and Zaoching of Manchuira and Yuchi and Yuanxi of China. Shoji’s ambitious novel was influenced by the war time atmosphere and by his experiences living in Taiwan from the age of six. This novel indirectly portrays Japan’s Southeast Asian policies and marriage between Japanese and Taiwanese; through the portrayal of Yasuko’s perilous marital life with her Taiwanese husband, Chen. The conclusion of the novel is not directly related with war propaganda literature. Rather, the representation of Southeast Asia is similar to that of novels depicting Manchuria as a fantasy in Korean literature of the 1930s. These vague portrayals reveal the illusion that functioned to relieve domestic unrest through the averting of people’s attention towards the new world, through representations of Manchuria. In contrast, in the 1940’s, it was Southeast Asia that came to be portrayed as the new frontier territory. Ōki Atsuo’s collection of poems Sing in the Vast Sea (unabarade utaeru) was directly related to Southeast Asian war issues of the 1940s and to the author’s experience after his boat capsized outside Java, Indonesia. This collection includes fourteen poems, and conjure an exotic mood to portray Indonesia. These highly lyrical poems were intended to raise morale on the battle front, as well as to heighten the Japanese peoples’ awareness of the war situation in Southeast Asia. From this examination of the Akutagawa and the GEALP prize winning works, we can conclude that these texts cannot be explained without examining their correlation to colonial narration. At the same time, it is evident that these works did not solely play a role as propaganda literature whose purpose it was to bolster the war atmosphere. Although they were far from disengaged from cultural policies, writers did attempt to protect literary value. The dichotomy between Japanese war propaganda and pure literature reveals writers’ desire to protect the value of pure literature, as shown in The Wife of Chen and When the Wild Goose Flew. Through their comparative analysis, these works provide keys to understanding Japanese language literature.