Takehiko Fukunaga (1918-1979) - Memories of Darkness and Reverberations of Light

Takehiko Fukunaga (1918-1979) - Memories of Darkness and Reverberations of Light
Darkness" as a theme that pervades Takehiko Fukunaga's work rises from the seam between personal history and the history of the times. Fukunaga mourns his mother at an early age, and the outline of his memory is fading away. The damp nature of Futsukaichi, Fukuoka, and the physical sensation of lying on a long hospital bed. These original experiences resonate with the darkness of Japanese society, where the coordinates of value were reversed after the war's end, and eventually gave his writing style a unique cold transparency and a tension like standing on the edge of a precipice. In his essay, Fukunaga asks the question, "The more the neon lights of the cities lit up by rapid economic growth brighten the night, the more they deprive people of their primordial "fear" and diminish the amount of light in their hearts.

Postwar literature was an attempt to reexamine the connection between human beings and the world from the depths of nihilism. The oppression and liberation of the Occupation, the Korean War economy and pollution, the student movement of the 1960s-the more tumultuous the surface of society, the deeper Fukunaga dived. In his novels, political slogans recede, but the issues of love, death, and faith soar as a clinging reality. In "Kusa no Hana," love is not a purification without ethics or formality, but an ordeal of facing one's own emptiness, and in "Shijima" beauty and salvation appear and disappear on the same ground. In "Island of Death," beauty and salvation appear and disappear on the same ground. Neither depends on the sweetness of the "story. Rather, they are the shivers that precede the story, the original sounds of loneliness and awe, and they are anchored in the hard writing of the story.

The hardness of the text is not a sculpture of ideas, but something excavated from the stratigraphy of the senses. Fukunaga touches the world with his sickly body, and the world responds with dull pain. Therefore, his style of writing has an aesthetic not in the opulence of metaphor, but in the temperature control of language. He saves formality, outlines with silence, and places light on each word as the reader breathes. His crossing of the border into poetry, translation, and even film theory was an attempt to liberate literature from being confined to a "narrative container" and to liberate it into a comprehensive art of the senses. The eye that gazes at the particles of light floating in the darkness of the screen is transformed into an ear that listens to the margins of the printed word.

While many of his contemporaries chose the path of directly grappling with society, Fukunaga walked the difficult road of the inner world. This is not an escape from reality. The more one is exposed to the hustle and bustle of the city, the pleasures of consumption, and the acceleration of rationality, the more one is pushed back to the old question, "Why do we live? He descends into it and looks at both salvation and the absence of salvation with an unadorned gaze. Scaffolding himself between atheism and piety, he does not sell the answers cheaply, sharpening the blade of the question - does love save, does death give meaning?

Takehiko Fukunaga is sometimes called the "last supremacist of art" in postwar Japan. But his supremacy is not a closed tower. It is an effort to recover the darkness of the mind and scoop up with words the faint light that can only be seen in that darkness, just as one recovers the night that has been extinguished by light pollution. In a time when neon lights continued to flourish, his literature functioned as a dark room, allowing the reader to experience the very process of the slow rising of the image. He does not miss the blood that flows on the fault line between the ideal and the reality. Bloodshed is not a metaphor, but the truth that always oozes out when existence rubs against itself.

The sound of despair in "Kusa no hana" and "Shijima" is the sound of despair that deepens only when there is salvation, and the deeper the despair, the more earnest the sound of prayer. Takehiko Fukunaga's works were a memory of darkness that was needed as the postwar light grew darker, a device to once again confirm with the temperature of words the primordial fear that remains within us all. He continues to quietly hand readers the courage to stop at the inverse proportion between brightness and darkness, and the boundary between the two.