著者

ツゥリト ジョン

出版者

国文学研究資料館

雑誌

国際日本文学研究集会会議録 = PROCEEDINGS OF INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON JAPANESE LITERATURE (ISSN:ISSN0387)

巻号頁・発行日

no.4, pp.24-33, 1981-02-01

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The tradition of diary literature, nikki bungaku, is a long and distinguished one within Japanese letters. Critical attention, however, has focused on classical diarists and not those of modern times. lbuse Masuji (bn. 1898) is one such present-day writer whose diaries, both his own and those kept by his fictional characters, are of interest not only for what they reveal about the author himself, but for what they may imply about the very nature of the genre.Ibuse’s own personal diaries frequently recall ―and in a sense, thus memorialize and revive― his unusually numerous friends and relatives who died premature deaths. lbuse’s diaries may be a means of expiating a kind of guilt he experiences as their survivor ; a guilt more fully explored in his fictional diaries, the most notable of which is Shigematsu's in Black Rain (Kuroi ame). Here, a survivor of the atomic holocaust in Hiroshima attempts to conceptualize, and thereby master, the trauma of the bomb by rewriting years later his brief diary of August, 1945.In conclusion, diaries, which by their periodic entries come to resemble a ritual, serve to bring a disorderly or even incomprehensible external world under the control of the writer's literary and recreative act.