### Hiroyuki Itsuki's Serials - Portraits of Cities and Youth in the 1970s

### Hiroyuki Itsuki's Serials - Portraits of Cities and Youth in the 1970s

Hiroyuki Itsuki became the darling of the age with his 1968 novel "Seinen wa Wilano wo Megaimasu" (Young Men Go to the Wilderness), and his momentum continued unabated into the 1970s. The period of high economic growth had come to a halt, and urbanization, pollution problems, the lingering effects of the Security Treaty struggle, and the setbacks of the student movement still weighed heavily on society. Young people from the countryside who had moved to the big cities enjoyed affluence, but they also had a void of values and loneliness. Itsuki's sharp portrayal of these sentiments drew sympathy as a "storyteller of the times" in his own right.

In his serialization, he depicted a group of adolescents against a backdrop of fashions and customs, using the lights and shadows of the city as his subject matter. While youth culture was rapidly diversifying in terms of fashion, music, and coffee shop culture, there was also a growing trend to distance oneself from political ideology. Itsuki sensed this "shift from ideology to consumption" and expressed it lightly in his novels and essays.

In his critical activities, he also published essays that were aware of social turning points, such as postwar democracy and a focus on Asia. In the 1970s, Japan faced a spiritual void in the shadow of its rapid economic growth, and Itsuki's serialization was an important attempt to scoop up that emptiness with words.