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In the Japanese literary scene in 2005, the 38-year-old Mitsuyo Kakuda successfully won the 132nd Naoki Prize for his work "She on the Other Side".
This is also Kakuda Mitsuyo, who won the Haiyan Newcomer Literature Award for his debut film "Happy Game" in 1990, and once again reached the top of the Japanese literary scene with a vigorous attitude after 15 years.
Since winning this highest prize in popular literature, Kakuda Mitsuyo's creation has been like a flowing stream, and he has successively collected various honors such as the Yasunari Kawabata Literature Award and the Izumi Kyoka Literature Award with works such as "The Imprisoned Mother", "Cicada of the Eighth Day", and "Son of the Other Side".
In terms of creative degree, the work "She on the Other Side" undoubtedly leads Mitsuyo Kakuda, who is struggling on the literary road, to a new direction, and opens up her literary journey of writing about the life troubles and spiritual troubles of Japanese women.
As one of the three most important female writers in today's Japanese literary scene, Kakuda Mitsuyo is different from Banana Yoshimoto, who uses lonely words to create spiritual healing for women, and unlike Kaori Ekoku, who writes women's delicate feelings with delicate literature, her words are more inclined to shout for the happiness and freedom of contemporary women.
"She on the Other Side", as an important turning point in Kakuda Mitsuyo's literary creation, is indeed a good work worth reading.
In this story around "dilemma" and "redemption", Mitsuyo Kakuda uses a dual-axis narrative technique to portray three women with very different personalities:
There are both the cheerful friend Caviar who brings redemption to the young girl Aoi who is deeply trapped in the trouble of growing up, and the new-age workplace woman Aoi who brings redemption to the housewife Xiao Yezi who is deeply trapped in the traditional predicament.
In a posture of overlapping and separating from each other, they become each other's redemptive light when they look at each other in the river of human growth.
Excellent literary works definitely contain the complexity of the times, if you analyze the literary significance of "She on the Other Side" from the perspective of the times, you will find:
Behind this soft and peaceful literary healing is Mitsuyo Kakuda, who is in the bitter sea of the times, silently exploring the path of seeking the salvation of contemporary women.
<h1 class = "pgc-h-arrow-right" > [Background of the times: combining literary creation and female barriers to lead people to reflect on prejudice].</h1>
In New York Square in 1985, Japan was forced to sign a contract that allowed the yen to appreciate sharply due to pressure exerted by economic powers such as the United States, Britain, and France. The unsupplied economic sanctions have left the country repairing the wounds of World War II decadent for another 10 years in an economic bubble created by itself.
In this stagnant window of development, family turmoil and gender discrimination caused by economic imbalances have once again stimulated the awakening of Japanese women, and with the deepening of Western feminist theory, more Japanese women have begun to try to think about more possibilities of their own lives in this grand wave of ups and downs.
However, this awakening of female consciousness seems to be contrary to the traditional Japanese family structure, and in the oppression of patriarchy and traditional morality, women who pursue self-liberation are also clamped down on the family identity of their husbands and godsons and the professional identity of finding themselves.
Born in 1967, Mitsuyo Kakuda is both a victim of the torrent of the times and a witness to the setbacks of women's change.
As a woman, after being keenly aware of the pain and suffering caused by the deep predicament of contemporary women, she has a compassionate heart and tries to explore the way out for contemporary women on the road of literature.
In 1990, the 23-year-old Kakuda Mitsuyo began to officially enter the stage of literary creation after resonating with many Japanese women with his debut film "Happy Game"; but it was also this work that mainly depicted the feelings of men and women, so that Kakuda Mitsuyo was trapped on the road of literary creation for 15 years.
Because the plight of Japanese women has long been not the love dilemma described in many literary works, but the unequal social status and family responsibilities brought about by the deep-rooted gender perception of society.
The primary responsibility of modern women's literature is to free them from lonely and helpless social relations. Combining literary creation with the barriers of the times, and using the power of words to break through the difficulties of the times, is the meaning of literary works.
Mitsuyo Kakuda, who fully understood this truth, began to update his creative concept with "Her on the Other Side" as a starting point, focusing more energy on the existence of contemporary Japanese women in confusion and spiritual distress, and highlighting women's misfortunes with seemingly happy but fragile family relationships, and showing women's plight with seemingly reasonable but contradictory social rules.
Seeing through the social situation, its pen power will be extremely cold. As Mitsuyo Kakuda said in an interview:
My motivation and creativity for writing all come from anger, from unevenness.
Therefore, in reading the work "Her on the Other Side", you can feel the pain caused by the clamping of family identity at any time, including the feeling of powerlessness caused by her husband's escape from family responsibilities, including the frustration caused by the insinuation of her mother-in-law accusing herself of disregarding the family, and the inferiority complex caused by the professional discrimination of the housewife.
In this work, Kakuda Mitsuyo does not hesitate to show the family shackles, social opinion and professional barriers endured by contemporary women's groups, presenting the most authentic fate of Japanese women in front of the world, leading everyone to wake up in blindness and reflect in prejudice.
Even if the style of the work "She on the Other Side" is soft and gentle, this creative way of using literature to reflect reality and break through the predicament with words has made Kakuda Mitsuyo's writing exude tenacity and strength, and has achieved her legendary story in modern Japanese literature.
<h1 class = "pgc-h-arrow-right" > [Theme Idea: Using women to redeem women to create spiritual healing brought about by gentle friendship].</h1>
At the 2005 award ceremony, Junichi Watanabe, as a member of the selection committee, commented on "She on the Other Side":
Truly write the personal problems of modern women, integrate their cunning, gentleness, friendship and other sensibilities into daily life, and turn them into outstanding works, which is a modern women's novel that has never been seen in the past.
In essence, "She on the Other Side" is completely a work that is deeply rooted in the plight of contemporary women, but in presenting the plight of women's lives, Mitsuyo Kakuda also naturally develops the theme of women's self-pursuit and growth, and through the mutual redemption of three different women, to create a spiritual healing brought about by gentle friendship.
The first to appear is Xiao Yezi, who is imprisoned in the identity of a housewife because of her introverted nature.
Not good at integrating into the group, in order to change the three-year-old daughter's equally timid and unsociable personality, she sent her daughter to a nursery school to play with children of the same age, and then walked out of the family to start looking for a job. Because of her hard-working and hard-working personality, Xiao Yezi successfully entered the tourism cleaning company founded by the strong woman Aoi and regained the courage to find the meaning of life in the independent and confident Aoi.
Along with this story, there is also the gray youth experienced by Aoi in her teenage years.
As a teenager, Aoi was bullied in school for a long time, so she and her parents moved to the rural town of her grandmother's family. Fearing being isolated by his classmates again, he integrates into the group in a way that pleases others in a new environment. In this pain and uneasiness, the appearance of the roe is like a lamp illuminating the gray youth of the aoi, and in the uninhibited caviar, the fragile aoi has also grown and changed.
Using the writing technique of two-line narrative, Kakuda Mitsuyo shows all the difficulties and troubles experienced by women, and through the portrayal of female friendship, the characters in his pen can get abundant healing from each other. Following the development of the plot, people can clearly see the opposite bank of each character in the long river of life:
On the other side of the small night child who is deeply trapped in family difficulties is Aoi, a strong woman in the workplace full of confidence; the girl Aoi who is deeply trapped in the growth dilemma is a free and unruly friend Caviar on the other shore; and Aoi, who has a caviar temperament when she grows up, also gets the salvation of Xiaoye from the other side in the deep workplace difficulties.
In these three characters, they all hide the troubles that the other party does not understand, and they are also trying to look at the other shore (the other party's life) that they cannot reach, but in this long-distance look, they also gain the courage and confidence to face the reality from the other side.
This overlapping and separated life eventually led to the symbolic "She on the Other Side".
It is worth noting that the three dilemmas described by Kakuda Mitsuyo in his works are all personally endured by women in real life, and the redemption that the three women bring to each other is also something that women in real life can easily have.
To this extent, Kakuda Mitsuyo's way of creating "women redeeming women" is an active exploration of redemption for the troubled contemporary Japanese women, and she is trying to use the unity of women's groups to break the shackles of social rules on women's bodies and minds.
This kind of utopian and beautiful creative thinking also makes "She on the Other Side" a gentle revelation dedicated to women by Mitsuyo Kakuda.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > [Emotional Tone: Soft and peaceful words between the lines, in fact, is a silent exploration of the reconciliation of the two sexes].</h1>
I have always believed that every literary work hides the confusion and loneliness of the creator, the hesitation and exploration of the creator in the environment of the times; this subconscious also determines the words flowing from the tip of the pen or loneliness or warmth, or the cold or peaceful.
There is no doubt that the emotional tone presented in the work "She on the Other Side" is soft and peaceful.
Influenced by the identity of the writer, it is easy to blindly determine that this emotional tone depends on the female identity of Mitsuyo Kakuda. However, if the work is placed in the context of the era in which the creator is located, it can clearly perceive the fundamental reason behind this softness and peace.
"She on the Other Side" was created in the early 21st century, and with the opening of the new century, more women tend to pursue their self-worth by going out of the family, but what they bring is the superposition of family responsibilities and workplace identity.
In this dual identity, the imbalance in the family structure is exacerbated; women take on the responsibility of supporting the family, while the male group is increasingly transparent in family responsibilities and scoffs at women's behavior outside the family.
In the work, which presents the family situation of Xiao Yuezi, we can also glimpse the unequal status of the sexes brought about by the traditional family structure:
When Xiao Yuezi plans to go out to work, her husband Shuji's various performances reflect contempt and ridicule;
When Xiao Yezi officially joined the company, Xiu Er still felt absurd about Xiao Yezi's work of cleaning up;
When Xiao Yezi encountered problems at work, Xiu'er seemed to seize a precious opportunity to suppress his wife: I have long said that you must not be able to do it...
Under the collision of female consciousness and patriarchy, the marriage of the two also gave birth to many rifts.
As a work depicting women's plight and redemption, it is the most appropriate way to sublimate the ideological theme of the work through the form of rebellion against male power, so in similar literary genres, other creators either repair the relationship between the characters or end the bad relationship as a female new birth.
But in Kakuda's pen, she never uses men as the antithesis of her writing, but always tries to downplay: to downplay the destructiveness of maleism in her work, and to dilute the presence of men in her work.
Therefore, when reading the work, it can be found that although Kakuda Mitsuyo describes the conflicting marriage between Konoko and Shuji, he hastily shelved his pen when he is about to cause dissatisfaction among readers; although Kakuda Mitsuyo describes Shuji's careless attitude towards the family, he gently brings it in the way of dragonflies; even at the end of the novel, he has not made a perfect explanation for the marriage between Shuji and Xiaoyezi.
Even though Shuji in the work is a male character that has to be depicted, Kakuda Mitsuyo arranges it to the edge.
She has not used the fierce conflict between men and women to create women's self-salvation, nor has she used the friendly attitude of men to complete women's self-revolution, and the whole work only focuses on the mutual encouragement and tolerance between women.
This way of writing is derived from the shackles of real life.
The identity of female creators makes Kakuda Mitsuyo clearly aware of the interweaving and symbiosis between the two sexes, based on literary and practical considerations, she must not be able to highlight the growth of women with the penalization of men, so she can only try to find a reconciliation between men and women in literary works.
However, this search process is obviously long and difficult for Mitsuyo Kakuda, who has just been involved in the theme of women's growth, and can only be silently explored in the form of "male marginalization".
This way of writing that avoids contradictions also dooms Kakuda Mitsuyo's works not to show fierce ups and downs, but to show a calm and peaceful emotional tone; from this point of view, this is also Kakuda Mitsuyo's respect for real life and his caution about women's themes.
< h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > [last word</h1>].
As an early masterpiece of Kakuda Mitsuyo, although "She on the Other Side" presents more "exploratory significance", it is still an ingenious work that empowers women.
In the story, Kakuda Mitsuyo uses the most ordinary three female experiences to vividly show the various dilemmas of the female group in the face of the outside world, and carefully reveals the self-dilemmas that come from the hearts of women in the most gentle way, namely:
After the awakening of self-consciousness, there is no clear gap between ideals and reality that arise from self-assertion.
In response to this dilemma, Kakuda Mitsuyo's redemption is to guide the female group to seek understanding and assistance from their closest companions, and to use the gentle power of friendship to break the dilemma on the road to self-worth.
This way of warming from precious friendship is also the best cure for us who are increasingly lonely and isolated.
At the same time, Kakuda Mitsuyo, who is a woman, also makes no secret of her confusion: she is using words to seek reconciliation between men and women, trying to create a balance between women's freedom and happiness, perhaps without success, so she can only marginalize men first.
This is also why reading "Her on the Other Side" always has a feeling of inexhaustibility.
In terms of my own feelings, I still like the style of Mitsuyo Kakuda. Although her stories are bland and fragmentary, the delicacy and gentleness flowing between the lines can completely calm our impetuous hearts; while listening to her cry for women's happiness and freedom, we can also get the healing and liberation of the soul.
I also hope that after reading the article, you can fall in love with Kakuda Mitsuyo' gentle apocalypse dedicated to women.
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