Living with Infinite Questions: Yutaka Hani and the Limits of Postwar Thought, Late 1940s-1960s

Living with Infinite Questions: Yutaka Hani and the Limits of Postwar Thought, Late 1940s-1960s

HANITANI Yutaka's literature and thought can be positioned as an activity that took on the defeat and restart that postwar Japan experienced from the most fundamental point. Behind the continued writing of his masterpiece, "The Dead Spirit," was the urgency of the times, which forced him to reexamine human existence itself, beyond social criticism and political standpoints.

Before the war, Haniwa experienced oppression and imprisonment under the Public Security Law. This experience made him realize how easily the state and ideology can restrain people and stop them from thinking. After the defeat of Japan in World War II, many intellectuals moved toward democracy and Marxism, but Haniiya remained skeptical that a change of ideology alone would not change human beings.

From the immediate postwar period through the 1950s, Japanese literature pushed sociality and criticism of reality to the forefront, but Haniya believed that analysis of social systems alone could not capture the roots of human complicity in oppression. What is depicted in "The Dead Spirit" is not an act or an incident, but a movement of consciousness that continues to doubt existence itself.

While Japanese society gained stability and affluence during the period of rapid economic growth, memories of the war and ideological conflicts were rapidly forgotten. Haniya's difficult and inconclusive writings were also a resistance to this oblivion. To sustain the question without providing an answer was itself an ethic in the postwar era.

Yutaka HANIYA was neither the standard-bearer of a movement nor the spokesman of the times, but left behind as his works the very attitude of never stopping thinking. The tension of his contemplation, which is close to silence, forms his position as the extreme limit of postwar thought.