Geneses of Shibusawa Tatsuhiko's Works: Tracing the Sources of the ‘Black Humor’ in ‘The Song of the Eradication’

Abstract

Even now, more than 30 years after his death, Shibasawa Tatsuhiko continues to gain new readership. His writing style diverged from the dominant contemporary literature and created its original style, which continued to grow for a long time. It can be said Shibusawa started his original style of writing from the novel ‘Bokumetsu no fu (撲滅の賦)’ which was traditionally believed to be based on Haniya Yutaka's work ‘Ishiki (意識)’. However, the core of this work, ‘The Eradication’ has roots in French writer Alphonse Allais' ‘Plaisir de Été’, making it a text with lyres of canonical intertextuality. Plaisir de Été was included in André Breton's ‘Anthology of Black Humor’ (Anthologie de L'humour Noir) (1950) and it was from this text that Shibasawa learned the elements that comprise his works, taking hints from these collage technics he acquires a writing style of inverting traditional values which established him as a heretical writer.