Page:Japanese Literature (Keene).pdf/118

106 literature began to appear, reflecting the low standard of the tastes of the reading public. One magazine publisher I know of, in order to sell his monthly, was forced to put a nude figure on the cover of each issue, and to disguise even the serious stories with titles of a vaguely indecent nature.

This phase of post-war fiction was succeeded by that of the war memoirs, not as in this country by famous generals and admirals revealing how it all happened, for most of the top-ranking Japanese officers were dead or imprisoned, but by ordinary soldiers. Some of them had been captured by the Americans and wrote of their experiences as prisoners. Others, and these were more interesting, told of the return of the conquerors of South-East Asia to the cold, miserable Japan of 1945. One of the best of these books was by a woman, Hayashi Fumiko (1904–51), and like an earlier novel by Futabatei Shimei was entitled The Drifting Cloud (1951), this being a familiar Japanese symbol for a person with no aims or occupation. The book tells of a young woman who goes to Indo-China to serve as a typist with the Japanese army of occupation. After years of austerity life in Japan, the luxury and luxuriance of Indo-China dazzles her, and under these exotic influences she turns from a mousy little typist to a femme fatale. In a small town in the hills behind Saigon she has a tempestuous love-affair with one of the Japanese army employees. The intensity of their love is perhaps increased by their feeling that, since Japan was fated to lose the war, they must exhaust the possibility of happiness which each moment gave them. When the war does end and they are repatriated, everything in Japan seems mean and ugly. Their love is killed by the drab surroundings and the difficulty of earning a living. The man returns for a time to his family and the woman has an affair with an American soldier. The days pass monotonously and