I riflessi della letteratura occidentale sulla letteratura giapponese del Novecento

Abstract

The article aims to give an overview of the different ways in which Japanese writers of the 20^th century dealt with the strong western influences that in the period between Taishō and Shōwa era brought about the birth of Japanese Modernism, a literary strand that brings together two great literary currents, the Shinkankakuha (School of Neosensimo) and Shinshinrigakuha (School of Neopsychology), whose main exponents are Yokomitsu Riichi (1898-1947), Itō Sei (1905-1969) and the future Nobel Prize winner Kawabata Yasunari (1899-1972). Modernism represents an essential link between late 19^th and modern 20^th century Japanese literature, which attained global renown thanks to aesthetes like Tanizaki Jun'ichirō (1886-1965), Kawabata Yasunari (1899-1972) and Mishima Yukio (1925-1970), but also to the decadent writers of the Buraiha, such as Dazai Osamu (1909-1948), and contemporaries authors such as the Nobel Prize Ōe Kenzaburō (1935-). Modernism represents the pinnacle of the study and assimilation of Western literature in Japan, an obsessive imitation of themes and style of European writers of the early 1900s; nevertheless, it also represents the achievement of the awareness of the impossibility of creating a truly modern and original Japanese literature through an empty imitation of writers such as James Joyce or Marcel Proust.