Word Games and Postwar Maturation: Saiichi Marutani and the Reorganization of Japanese Literature from the 1960s to the 1990s

Word Games and Postwar Maturation: Saiichi Marutani and the Reorganization of Japanese Literature from the 1960s to the 1990s
Marutani Saiichi's literature and criticism occupy a unique position in the postwar period of maturation and stagnation that followed Japan's high economic growth after passing through a period of reflection and ideology. He is a writer who did not directly deal with his war experiences or political setbacks, but who nevertheless remained deeply involved in the core of postwar literature.

In the 1960s, Japanese literature juxtaposed the earnestness of the war experience with the sensibility of consumer society. Marutani did not identify with either, and he expressed his discomfort with the fact that postwar literature had been based solely on seriousness and ethics. His starting point was the sense that literature should recover not only accusations but also the art of language and the pleasures of form.

With his background as a scholar of English literature, Marutani reinterpreted Japanese literature in a historical and international context. Through quotation, parody, and stylistic manipulation, he restores the games and intellectual pleasures that modern literature has discarded. His attitude was an attempt to reorganize postwar literature from a different perspective.

From the 1970s onward, in an age of ideological fatigue, Marutani continued to precisely examine the behavior of language itself. His literature is significant in that it treats the postwar period as a text to be re-edited and maintains a critical tension without shouting.