Kuroshima Denji

Kuroshima Denji ( Japanese 黒 島 伝 治 ; * December 12, 1898 , in Nōma (today: Shōdoshima ), Kagawa Prefecture ; † October 17, 1943 ) was a Japanese writer.

Life

He was born in the village of Nōma into a poor farming family, the writer Iwai Sakae came from the neighboring village of Sakate , whose future husband, Kuroshima's childhood friend Tsuboi Shigeji , will eventually help him to get his first publication (today both villages are united in the city of Shōdoshima). He was unable to attend high school, but while he was working he saved his tuition fees and went to Waseda University , where he studied literature. Among his favorites were Russian literature such as von Dostoevsky or Tolstoy , but especially Chekhov . Because he had received a very poor education by then, he asked someone else to take the entrance exam for him - and got away with it. Since he came from a vocational school, deferment from conscription was not possible, and after a few months at university he was forced to take up military service. He remained stationed with the Himeji Regiment in Japan for most of the time , but shortly before the end of his engagement he had to go to war for a year and assist Japan in the Siberian intervention . These experiences were based on his main works Uzumakeru tori no mure ( 渦 巻 け る 烏 の 群 , "A flock of swirling crows") and Sori ( 橇 , "The Sleigh") "Siberian Affairs" ( シ ベ リ ア も の , Shiberia Mono ) called and bore fruit as the rare genre of war literature in Japanese literary history .

After his return he began to write and became famous in 1925 with the story Dempō ( 電報 , English “The Telegram”) published in Tsuboi Shigeji's magazine Chōyrū ( 潮流 , English “The Telegram”), which describes a family whose son is because of her Poverty is persuaded to give up schooling even though he had passed the entrance exam. Since the proletarian literature of the time mainly dealt with workers, Kuroshima's works, which dealt with peasants, were warmly welcomed. A well-known work in this direction is Tongun ( 豚 群 , English "A herd of pigs"), which describes farmers who oppose the seizure.

In 1930 he took the Jinan incident as the basis for his new novel Busōseru Shigai ( 武装 せ る 市街 , English "Militarized streets"), which brought to light the entanglement between Japan and China, but the sale was banned on the spot. Even after the war there were problems with this book: although it was planned to be published during the occupation , its sale was banned by the occupation censors and it was only published after the peace treaty entered into force ; at a time when Kuroshima had already passed away.

In the early 1930s he lived in isolation in his home village because of a lung disease without publishing anything, but he remained under the surveillance of the Tokkō secret police . As a result, his widow burned almost all letters and leftover manuscripts after his death. Only the diary during his military service was spared and was published after the war as Guntai Nikki ( 軍隊 日記 , dt. "Army diary").

literature

• Kuroshima Denji: A Flock of Swirling Crows: and Other Proletarian Writings . Translated by Zeljko Cipris. University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu 2005, ISBN 978-0-8248-2926-1 , 1-13.

  Contains the stories The Telegram , A Herd of Pigs , The Sugar Thief , Their Lives , Siberia in the Snow , The Sleigh , A Flock of Swirling Crows , The Hole , Land Rising and Falling , The Cape , Militarized Streets

Web links

• Digitized works at Aozora Bunko (Japanese)
• Against the System: Antiwar Writing of Kuroshima Denji by Zeljko Cipris (English)

Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . Thus Kuroshima is the family name, Denji the first name.