Honda Akigo: A Critic Who Unearthed the Strata of Postwar Japanese Literature, 1945-1970s

Honda Akigo: A Critic Who Unearthed the Strata of Postwar Japanese Literature, 1945-1970s
Honda Shugo (1908-2001) was a leading critic who systematized the history of modern Japanese literature by drastically changing the method of postwar Japanese literary studies. After Japan's defeat in World War II, its sense of values collapsed and literature faced fundamental issues such as war responsibility and individual ethics. Honda established a method of reading literature from the Meiji to the Showa periods in the context of historical continuity, linking the writer's thought, background, life, and historical circumstances, and thus achieved a breakaway from impressionistic criticism.

In Meiji literature, he introduced a structural perspective to literary history by positioning writers within the framework of the tension between Western thought and tradition and the formation of the modern ego. In addition, he analyzed Yukio Mishima by reading the nihilism of postwar society and Kenzaburo Oe by focusing on the image of the young intellectual formed in the contradictions of postwar democracy, thereby connecting his works with the spirit of the times.

In the period of rapid economic growth, when human alienation and emptiness were expanding, he sought the role of literature in restoring human wholeness and insisted that literature should confront historical experience even as political struggles intensified. Honda's critical spirit has continued to exert a strong influence on today's literary studies through his thoroughgoing viewpoint of reading works in the context of history in a multilayered manner.