Date of Award
5-6-2024
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Degree Type
Dissertation
Abstract
Japan’s 1968 began in the mid-1960s as localized protests at a handful of universities but grew into a nationwide leftist student movement by the decade’s end. As the protests spread to campuses across Japan, mass media increasingly focused on incidents of violence, and public opinion turned against the students. Concurrently, the passing of the heavy-handed University Management Act in the summer of 1969 allowed authorities to intervene quickly to quell campus demonstrations. By late 1970, the student movement was over. This end saw several high-profile acts of politically motivated violence carried out by radical leftist groups in the early 1970s. A teleology of failure dominates collective memory of the student movement, through which all events of the movement are read through and as leading to this violent end. Narrative and Meaning-Making: Stories of Japan’s 1968 examines fictional accounts of the late 1960s Japanese student movement. It argues that many writers who participated in campus protests went on to use fiction to investigate, challenge, or overturn the dominant narrative of the protests as a failure. These works also interrogate the linear narrative of progress that has undergirded much of postwar Japanese society. Chapter One details how Kiriyama Kasane employs alternative history in his novel Partisan Legend to tell stories of Japan’s 1968 that historical accounts obscure. Through family ties that link a fictional partisan group active during World War II and two real radical leftist groups born from the student movement, Japan’s 1968 becomes a part of a larger history of anti-imperial resistance. Chapter Two traces how fictional depictions of the student movement changed after the burst of the bubble economy in the early Nineties by comparing two versions of the novel Rain of Light by Tatematsu Wahei. The work began serialization in 1993 but was pulled after accusations of plagiarism, and a radically reimagined version appeared in 1998. While the 1993 version is a realistic narrative told from the time of the protests, the 1998 version starts with a framing narrative set in 2030 Japan and narrates the student movement from multiple and contradicting perspectives. Chapter Three focuses on how Murakami Haruki writes indirectly about Japan’s 1968 in his first three novels: Hear the Wind Sing, Pinball 1973, and A Wild Sheep Chase. It shows that by refusing to focus on the collapse of the student movement, Murakami Haruki allows his characters to process the failure of Japan’s 1968 through fantastical quests in the 1970s. Chapter Four turns to Murakami Ryū’s semi-autobiographical novel 69. It argues that through narrating the student movement from its periphery, a small town on the western edge of Kyushu, Murakami Ryū proposes the creation of a continual present through a communal sense of festival to escape the rigid conformity of contemporary Japan. The first half of the conclusion charts a history of Japanese fiction over a twenty-year period from the middle of the 1970s to the middle of the 1990s through the lens of the Japanese New Left student movement. The second half uses two novels by Kōkami Shōji, I Want to Meet the You Who Wore a Helmet and The Revolution That We Loved, as a framing device to offer a theory of the relationship between fiction and the personal and collective memory of Japan’s 1968. This dissertation addresses how fiction can reflect and resist dominant historical narratives. It shows that for some authors who participated in Japan’s 1968, fictional accounts of the protest were a way to challenge the teleology of failure that dominates collective memory of the student movement. Through this resistance, these works also lay bare the constructed and contingent nature of historical narratives themselves.
Language
English (en)
Chair and Committee
Rebecca Copeland
Recommended Citation
Manfredi, Adam Samuel, "Narrative and Meaning-Making: Stories of Japan’s 1968" (2024). Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 3044.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds/3044