著者

王 成

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:03877280)

巻号頁・発行日

no.19, pp.77-86, 1996-10-01

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Autumn Sorrow (aki no nageki) is a short story by Fukunaga Takehiko, first published in the literary magazine "Meiso" in November, 1954.One of many experimental works by Fukunaga, who is regarded primarily as an avant-garde writer, this story is highly complex in both language and design. The reader is drawn into the solitary world of the heroine Sanae, whose brother died by his own hand one autumn night ten years earlier. In his depiction of her lonely existence, Fukunaga resolutely confronts "time"― here portrayed as a phenomenon of evil -and analyses in detail the interaction between time and fiction. In this paper I would like to consider the relation in the story between the structure of time and the development of the narrative. In Autumn Sorrow, the author consciously denies the continuity of time by overlapping and intertwining past and present within the story, thus advocating to the reader a restructuring of time guided by the creation and judgement of reader and author. Fukunaga constantly shifts time from the present to the past in successive sentences, or even within a single sentence. I would like to examine the ways in which Fukunaga deals with these timeshifts.Autumn Sorrow develops the theme of combining the chronological time of the story itself with the psychological time of the heroine, Sanae. I would like to examine the function of time and memory within the structure of the story.Fukunaga sees creative co-operation between reader and author as the ideal component for construction of a story. To draw the reader completely into the world of the story, he has created not just an artificial time structure, but a story in which he measures the distance between the author, the characters, and the reader. In Autumn Sorrow, direct and indirect narratives are skillfully mixed, with dialogue expressed on the same level as the prose, removing the borders between the real world and the inner world of the characters, aiming at a single level for reader, characters, and author.The principal motifs of the story are war, and the heredity of madness. The construction of the story, involving as it does the setting and solving of various puzzles, leaves the story open to numerous, many-sided interpretations.