2018 Volume 98 Pages 210-225
This paper considers the relationship between the concept of decadence in Darakuron (Shinchō, 1946.04) and the dekadensu (“decadence” written phonetically in the katakana script), advocated by Yasuda Yojūrō during World War II. Even while resisting history and fate, the first-person narrator of Darakuron is enthralled by his memories of the overwhelming “beauty” of aerial bombardment, and the word decadence emerges from the midst of those memories. Sakaguchi's decadence is a concept wrested from conflict with and resistance to the aesthetics of dekandensu as advocated during the war by Yasuda Yojūrō, an aesthetic that found beauty in young men heading to their deaths and naturalized the idea of fate. In this paper, I show that by embracing the possibilities of decadence, the narrator of Darakuron refutes the concepts of fate and beauty that trapped his earlier self. This demonstrates that in Darakuron, Sakaguchi performatively constructs a self that spans both the wartime and postwar periods.
