Akio Kimura is Professor at Kitami Institute of Technology. He received an M.A. from Sophia University (Tokyo) and another M.A. and a Ph.D. from Drew University (New Jersey). He is the author of Faulkner and Oe: The Self-Critical Imagination (University Press of America, 2007), and articles on Japanese and American literature, and on genocide, including “Genocide and the Modern Mind: Intention and Structure” (Journal of Genocide Research 5.3 [2003]).Faulkner and Oe: The Self-Critical Imagination
Author: Akio Kimura
Publisher: U. Press of America
Format: Paperback
Published on: 2007
ISBN-10: 0761836632
Language: English
Pages: 208
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Akio Kimura expertly investigates Oe’s feminist turn in his novels in the 1980s as a criticism of this “I” as an authoritarian first-person narrator. Oe considers this concept to be a disruptive reflection of Japanese society’s established order. Oe’s response to such a disruption is the introduction of a series of metaphors utilized in order to represent Faulkner’s individualism and the subsequent deconstruction of Japanese autocracy. Drawing on Kofman, Irigaray, and Derrida, this book explores how Faulkner’s individualism inspires Oe to juxtapose the Japanese authoritarian and the Faulknerian self-critical.
A Note from the Editors at Library of Social Science:
Yukio Mishima (1925-1970) One of the most significant Japanese authors post WW II, Mishima was a novelist, playwright and film director. He wrote about Japan’s imperial past, its heroic ideals, samurai traditions and the honor of dying for one’s country. On November 25, 1970 – following a failed coup to restore the Emperor power – Mishima killed himself following the ritual of Seppuku or disembowelment performed in public.
Hirohito (1901-1989) Emperor of Japan from 1926 to 1989. There has been debate about his role during Japan military expansion from the 1930s to 1945 and about his willingness or opposition to militarist elements of his government. After 1945, Hirohito was not prosecuted for war crimes. His imperial status changed dramatically in 1946 when he renounced the traditional divine status.
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In Japan, Akio Kimura explains, there were two views of the emperor’s divinity during the Second World War. According to one, the Emperor was a God: the absolute and transcendental being. The second reduced the emperor to a demigod in Shinto’s polytheistic tradition, or even denied the emperor’s divinity entirely. Mishima Yukio embraced the idea of the Emperor as God.
Many Japanese, Kimura says, were shocked when Hirohito renounced his divinity after the war—because they felt they had been “deprived of the cause of war.” Mishima spoke for “those who died for the emperor believing he was God.” By killing himself, Mishima “reenacted the sacrificial death for the emperor during World War II,” and by doing so criticized Emperor Hirohito for “betraying those who had died for him believing in his divinity.” With his spectacular suicide, Mishima sought to “remind the postwar Japanese of what they had believed in during the war.”
Just as Hitler expected every German to sacrifice his life for the country, so the Japanese military government, Kimura says, “expected every Japanese to sacrifice their lives for their country” under the slogan, “ichioku sogyokusai,” which means “one hundred million broken jewels.” The people were encouraged to “keep fighting to the death.”
Many Japanese died while the government hesitated to surrender, among them the victims of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, who were sacrificed “not so much for the country as for the emperor.” Many Japanese took it for granted that they had to sacrifice their lives.
The demolition of State Shinto by the Shinto Directive at the end of the war was followed by Emperor Hirohito’s Imperial Rescript at the beginning of 1946 which—under the direction of General Headquarters—renounced the emperor’s divinity, calling it a “false conception.” Mishima thought Hirohito was “wrong in treating his divinity as fiction.”
For Mishima, the Emperor was god, and therefore did not have to say or do anything. During the war, the “emperor’s presence as God in itself was an order to die.” Mishima, it would appear, could not bear the “death of God.” He blamed Hirohito for “failing to satisfy those who died for the emperor as God.” Mishima killed himself on November 25, 1970, crying out “long live the emperor.” He disclosed, Kimura says, an emotion that had been “hidden in the depths of the psyche for many Japanese since the war ended.”
Mishima expected his death to be “proof that the emperor was actually present as God.” By virtue of his spectacular death by seppuku, Mishima sought to “revive the belief in the emperor as God” in an age when people had “begun to forget the belief they had during WWII.” Of course, for those who did not share his belief, Mishima “died in vain for a God who was no longer there.”