Yamamuro Shizuka’s Reception of Selma Lagerlöf:

Modern Criticism of Nordic Literature

Abstract

　This thesis deals with Yamamuro Shizuka’s reception of Nordic literature, especially that of Selma Lagerlöf. Yamamuro is the first Japanese author who received Nordic literature comprehensively and systematically. I analyze how Yamamuro received Nordic literature and why he did so, to analyze the prototype of Nordic image as a nostalgic idyll and Lagerlöf as a visionary pacifist.

　First, I will write about Yamamuro’s life and thoughts. He was a Marxist and renounced the left (known as “Tenkō” or “changing direction”). After the Second World War he founded the magazine Kindaibungaku (“modern literature”), in collaboration with five other authors who had also changed direction. Their purpose was to provide a national community, because they thought that the callowness of the modern ego had been the cause of militarism and fascism. Yamamuro and the other members often presented Nordic literature in Kindaibungaku.

　Next, I will analyze the relationship between Yamamuro’s ideas about modernism and his reception of Nordic literature. After his ideological change of direction, Yamamuro criticized American, Russian and German literature, which he had previously presented often as a Marxist, stating that the revolution was too superficial and temporary. At that time he empathized with classic literature from Japan and China. But Yamamuro was not engaged in the presentation of classic literature, because in his opinion, the classical authors had no reason, and therefore, no conflict. Therefore, Yamamuro embraced Nordic literature as the periphery of modernity for countries such as Japan, which did not show evidence of high modernity, in contrast to nations such as America, Russia and Germany, which were not stagnant as were the old Japan and China.