野上弥生子とフランク・ヴェデキント(二) : 『若い息子』と『春の目ざめ』

概要

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Wakai Musuko (The Young Son), one of the masterpieces of Yaeko Nogami's novels written before World War II, deals with the relationship between an intellectual and conscientious young man and socialism. As Sumiko Watanabe points out, Keiji Kudo, the hero of Wakai Musuko, is the male version of Machiko, the heroine of Machiko. The two novels have another thing in common. This is the fact that Wakai Musuko is written based on a European literary work, just as Machiko is based on Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. The literary work is Frank Wedekind's Fruhlings Erwachen. In this paper, the characters, plots and themes in Wakai Musuko and Fruhlings Erwachen are compared and it is demonstrated that the former is an adaptation of the latter : Yaeko Nogami changed the theme of Fruhlings Erwachen - conflict between the young people's sexuality and the school authorities trying to suppress this natural sexual desire - into the conflict between young intellectuals awakening to socialism and the school authorities ruthlessly oppressing the socialist movement. By the adaptation she is successful in depicting effectively the internal and external struggles of intellectual young people with a strong sense of justice in the early Showa era.