The Third Nihon Koshimaki Literary Grand Prize - This Month's Qualifying Entries (July 1974)

The Third Nihon Koshimaki Literary Grand Prize - This Month's Qualifying Entries (July 1974)
The "Third Nihon Koshimaki Bungaku Taisho" (Japan Koshimaki Literature Award), held in 1974 in the magazine Omoshiban, was an attempt to symbolize a time when the postwar literary order was collapsing and new writers were trying to challenge conventional ideas. Koshimaki literature is a generic term for literature and art that is so provocative that it "precedes the obi when it hits the bookstore shelves," and that puts obscenity and a sense of life at the forefront.
In the early 1970s, the Japanese literary world was at a turning point. With the lingering heat from the Security Treaty struggle and the Zenkyoto movement, the relationship between politics and literature was once again questioned, and the boundary between pure literature and popular literature became blurred. While society became more affluent with rapid economic growth, young writers sought to express the stagnation of the times by depicting contemporary people who were losing their "sense of life.
The magazine was also an outlet for aspiring writers and cultural figures, and a place where those who could not make it into the center of the literary world could express themselves using verbal violence and humor as weapons.
Many of the submissions selected for this month's qualifying round deal with the emptiness of postwar democracy and sexual liberation at the same time, and give a sense of the "literary movement from below" in the literary magazines of the time. The works were lined with pieces that ridiculed the system and ethics while resonating with subcultures, underground theater, and Nouvelle Vague films, symbolizing the moment when "literature went out on the town.
The style of these works was closer to the light-hearted narratives of Kojimasa Tanaka and Ken Kaiko than the heavy-handed ideologies of Yukio Mishima and Kenzaburo Oe, and captured the reality that drifted between the cracks of everyday life, such as bars, sexuality, work, and boredom.
At the time, "pure literature" was still considered highbrow in the literary world, but "Omoshiban" could be said to be an attempt to recover the living language of literature by laughing off the formality of the genre. In other words, the "Koshimaki Literary Award" was part of a movement to democratize literature, an experiment to break down the boundary between writers and readers.
The magazine's pages in 1974 pulsated with the emptiness that followed the collapse of postwar idealism and the "fever of the lower strata of the Showa era," which sought to unearth new forms of expression from this emptiness. This corner, with its mixture of sex and violence, laughter and loneliness, was proof of the raw freedom of Japanese literature in the 1970s.