2018 Volume 98 Pages 178-193
The proletarian writer Murayama Tomoyoshi's first work after his recantation (tenkō) was the novella Byakuya, which depicts the marital relationship between Eiji, a proletarian writer who, like the author, has officially recanted in court and recently returned from prison, and his wife Noriko. After his release, Eiji begins to suspect that Noriko has had physical relations with someone during his absence; in response, Noriko asks for a divorce, and confesses that she has long been in love with their comrade Kimura who, having refused to recant, is still behind bars. By passively listening to her love story, Eiji enters into an imaginary rivalry with Kimura, a man he admires as an ideal revolutionary. I argue that the construction of the text Byakuya allows for two contradictory interpretations of the role of Noriko's story. On the one hand, his wife's love story lets Eiji reconstruct in his imagination the solidarity with a male comrade that the repression inflicted by state power has destroyed. By examining Murayama's presentation of his protagonist's reaction to his wife's love affair, I show that this work can be read as the author's attempt to validate his own recantation. On the other hand, however, the nested narrative of Noriko, a woman who has supported and mediated this homosocial male bonding from the margins of the leftist movement, also works to defamiliarize it. In this paper, I compare the narrative structure of this novella, with its framing device in which Noriko's first-person narrative is nested, to a mirror that reflects left-right images reversed, and assert that this structure facilitates the defamiliarization of the leftist male homosocial continuum. I also give a detailed analysis of Noriko's language, and show how it creates a twisted image of the protagonist's homosocial desire.
