ボーイ・ミーツ・ボーイ : 『車輪の下』と近代日本

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The purpose of this paper is to analyze the male-male-relationship in Hermann Hesse's school story Unterm Rad, and to re-examine the reasons why this novel was so popular in Japan. In the last half of the 1930s in Japan Hesse's early works were received first by students of the Higher School (Kyusei Koto Gakko) who were then regarded as the national elite. The education in this institution, which was a Japanese equivalent of the Public School and the Gymnasium, was characterized by its culture education. Without some understanding of this culture education, called "Kyoyoshugi" in Japanese, one cannot understand how the young elite read Hesse's works at that time. I focus on the androcentric or male homosocial aspect of the culture education. It is often said that in Hesse's works such as Peter Camenzind, Unterm Rad and Demian, which are particularly popular in Japan, a close friendship between two schoolboys (or students) plays a role. However, the analysis in this article attempts to show that this friendship has a surprising similarity with a heterosexual (therefore not a homosexual) relationship: one is a manly leader and another is feminized. But what is described in the novels is that finally this feminized boy becomes a man. Only the hero (or rather the antihero) of Unterm Rad, Hans Giebenrath cannot become a man and kills himself while his friend Hermann Heilner displays a new manliness that is not yet recognized at school and in the bourgeois society. The crisis of masculine identity (or the regeneration of manliness), which was a problem in Europe at the turn of the century and which Hesse's school stories deal with, was also a central concern for the young elite in the times of Japanese Fascism when the nation was seen as male, and Asian colonies as female.
桃山学院大学の論文
2000-12-20

ボーイ・ミーツ・ボーイ : 『車輪の下』と近代日本

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