World War II and its aftermath in the fiction and essays of Sakaguchi Ango (1906–1955)

Abstract

The article provides the first comparative analysis of themes and imagery related to World War II in both essays and fiction of Sakaguchi Ango (1906–1955). The programmatic essays “A Personal View of Japanese Culture” (1942) and “Discourse on Decadence” (1946) are examined, in which Sakaguchi expresses his view of Japanese culture and human nature, drawing on wartime ideological stances and his personal experience of the war. From Sakaguchi’s prose fiction, the short stories “The Idiot” (1946) and “Mr. Sun-Moon” (1949) are used as material for the study: the former describes the bombing of Tokyo from the perspective of an ordinary Japanese person, while the latter depicts a sense of loss in the postwar social crisis. The analysis shows that Sakaguchi preferred to interpret wartime experience through the lens of Buddhism, considering destruction and defeat as a particular example of the fragility of human nature. He presents a way out of the prevailing situation as paradoxical rebirth through the experience of tragedy or transgression.

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