Search

This article briefly analyzes Japanese literature studies in China over the past forty years. In the first period (1979-1989), researchers focused on proletarian literature, before breaking through the forbidden area of literature and reevaluating other schools’ writers and works by discriminating the concept of realism. In the second period(1990-1999), literary concepts changed and many claimed that ideological evaluation criteria should be replaced by cultural and aesthetic evaluation criteria. Researchers started to explore the diversity and the uniqueness of Japanese modern and contemporary literature. In the third period (2000- ), researchers analyzed Japanese literature in the “East Asian culture field” and paid close attention to the following three issues: first, the issue of war cognition; second, the issue of Chinese translation of Japanese literature; third, the relationship between East Asian culture and Japanese modern and contemporary literature. Based on the above, this paper puts much emphasis on the relationship between Chinese translation of Japanese literature and the internationalization of Japanese literature studies.

Through journalism, the Japanese literary world diversified after World War II, during which literary magazines and general magazines such as Shinchō and Gunzo played a central role. Works and comments published in these magazines not only offered a special discussion space but also critically impacted the development of postwar pure literature. Meanwhile, Dōjinshi such as Kyushubungaku and popular literature such as detective stories, which were interacting with and contradicting pure literature, formed their own space of discourse as well. It was this differentiation within the literary world that has led to the diversity of modern Japanese literature as well as its richness.

As the slogan of Manchukuo’s culture and literature, when the magazine Manchuria Romantic started publication, the perspective of Chinese culture and literature in Manchukuo was absent. Needless to say, Ouchi Takao’s translation ended this deficiency. Thus, it can be said that Ouchi’s translation made great contributions to construct the conception of Manchukuo’s literature. However, surpassing the darkness of the Chinese literature in the Manchukuo, Manchuria Romantic started to emphasize the slogan of ‘Kenkoku Spirit’. In contrast, Ouchi took darkness as the character of northern literature and labor literature. He gave a positive attitude to darkness, and undertook to disintegrate the conception of Manchukuo’s literature. In this way, Ouchi’s resistance to the colonial rule of speech by his translation is elucidated