Confronting Japan's war in China in modern Japanese literature: Takeda Taijun, Murakami Haruki and Inoue Yasushi

Abstract

Japan has borrowed much from its continental neighbor, China: a writing system, ideas of government, religion and aspects of culture. The importation of Chinese exemplars and the strong sense of cultural indebtedness have been balanced by a belief in the modern period that China was somehow inferior, or had lost its claim to civilizational greatness. Japan's contradictory view of China continues to this day. In the post-war era, writers such as Inoue Yasushi, Takeda Taijun and Murakami Haruki have written about the legacy of World War Two and Japan's lingering guilt and concomitant revisionism. I intend to demonstrate, via an examination of these authors, how World War Two, specifically Japan's war-time activities in China and Manchuria, and its aftermath are portrayed in fiction.