Decadence, double agents, and a drunken boat: colonial legacies in Tanaka Hidemitsu's Yoidorebune

The buraiha (decadent school) is an appellation given to a group of writers who emerged in the years following Japan's unconditional surrender to the Allied Powers in 1945.While these writers did not actively identify themselves as a coherent literary circle, their writings shared an emphasis on nihilistic recklessness, dissolution, and bodily excess that was not simply a response to the chaotic conditions of immediate postwar Japan but an attempt to transcend or disrupt the prewar-postwar continuities of the authoritarian state.In 1947, for example, Tamura Taijirō (1911-1983) published an influential essay entitled "Nikutai ga ningen de aru" ("Flesh is Human"), in which he extolled the ability of the human body to resist or counteract the pernicious ideology of the state. 1 The only true things in the world, Tamura declared, were human flesh and its desires.He went on to call for a "literature of depravity" (haitai bungaku) that would "graphically depict today's realities . . . the realities of a defeated nation." 2 The 1949 long novel Yoidorebune (Drunken Boat) by Tanaka Hidemitsu (1913-1949) can be considered one example of this kind of literature.Set in colonial-period Korea and very loosely based on Tanaka's own life, Yoidorebune details the wartime activities of the writer Sakamoto Kōkichi and the alluring poet-turned-spy Ro Tenshin (Kr.Ro Ch'ŏnsim).Kōkichi has been asked to help organize a welcome reception for visiting members of the Greater East Asian Writers' Meeting (Daitōa bungakusha kaigi) being organized by the Peoples' League (Aohitokusa renmei).3 Over the course of four days, however, the reader sees Kōkichi burn through the money given to him for the welcome reception on alcohol while wallowing in a Support for this research was funded by an Insight Development Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Postdoctoral Fellowship for Overseas Researchers.1 Tamura Taijirō, "Nikutai ga ningen de aru" as reprinted in Nihon kindai bungaku hyōron sen: Shōwa hen ed.Chiba Shunji et al. (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2004), 365-372.Originally published in the May 1947 issue of Gunzō.As Douglas Slaymaker points out, however, Tamura "roots that freedom from the body in the (male) body" (44), making the gendered carnality of his female characters a problematic issue.See Slaymaker, The Body in Postwar Japanese Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2004), especially chapters 2 and 3.2 Tamura, "Nikutai ga ningen de aru," 370. 3 The Daitōa bungakusha kaigi is based on the Daitōa bungakusha taikai (Great East Asian Writers' Conference), a Pan-Asian conference meant to promote and fit into Japan's imperial visions of a Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.Although the conference convened for the first time in November 1942, Tanaka changes the date in Yoidorebune to September 1943.Aohitokusa renmei is a fictional organization that closely resembles the real-life Ryokki (Green Flag), a literary organization affiliated with the General-Government of Korea.

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