On the Memory and History of Three Generations of Families in East Asia: Research on Akira Higashiyama s Dissimilation of Hardboiled Detective Novels

SAKAMOTO, Saori

doi:2017.4.1.43

The Journal of Japanese Language Literature Studies > Volume 4(1); 2017 > Article

Article

Border Crossings: The Journal of Japanese-Language Literature Studies 2017;4(1): 43-57.
doi: https://doi.org/10.22628/bcjjl.2017.4.1.43

On the Memory and History of Three Generations of Families in East Asia: Research on Akira Higashiyama s Dissimilation of Hardboiled Detective Novels

Saori SAKAMOTO

天主敎輔仁大孝副敎授

Correspondence Saori SAKAMOTO ,Email: 049296@mail.fju.edu.tw

Published online: 30 June 2017.

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

ABSTRACT

Seventy years after the war, listening to the stories of the grandparents has currently become a global trend in the modern world. Naoki Hyakuta's novel, The Eternal Zero, is example. Besides, Eiji Oguma, a sociologist, also asserted the importance of referring to “the records” of “the involved parties" in order to prevent ”the crisis of romanticization" triggered by the grandchildren when inheriting such “memories.”
On the one hand, Oguma's viewpoints seems significant when "restating history and memory," which may be easily influenced by biased political and ethnic ideologies. However, if people cannot resist the desire of “roman社cization,” is there a new possibility to gratify such needs and at the same time interpret “memory and history of three generations of families in East Asia?” To answer this question, Akira Higashiyama's Flow, the winner of Naoki Prize, a literary award Award in 2015, is the best demonstration. Setting a second-generation Mainland youth as the protagonist of this work, Higashiyama portrays “the memory of three generations of families" respectively in Mainland China, Taiwan and Japan with an overwhelming sense of speed, to ignite sharp criticism and a fundamental reexamination of “history” and “memory” in East Asia.
Kazuya Fukuda, a literary critic, also points out that if "literature" has the ability to describe chaos when depicting “wars” and “histories” really matters. In recent years, such depictive power has been brewing in hardboiled detective novels. Therefore, this research will focus on these novels to investigate how Akira Higashiyama dissimilates and describes “memory and history of three generations of families in East Asia.”