Abeshougo And <the Commander's Holiday>

The"Introverted Generation"belongs to the sixth group of the new Japnese writer after WWII, whose works are about daily life. Japnese critic Odagiri Hideo once criticized this group for their ignorance of the social problems and for their indulging in their inner world , the daily trivials and the unreal pursuit, while in fact this is their style—using the everyday language to inspect the social probles from the common people's living conditionAbe shougo is a representative of the"Introverted Generation",whose firt novel <The chaildren's house> (1962) won the fifteenth Literature Award . The publishing of his representative <The commander's holiday>in <New trends>in 1970 promoted the formation of the"Introverted Generation".<The commander's holiday>is the only work interfering with the topic of war among the"Introverted Generation"literature.This work is mainly Japanese soldier's story which took place after the surrender of the Japanese government in WWII. After the surrender, the soldier came back to his hometown and was hated and blamed by his own people, even his family for the result of the war.As a representative of the daily literature,<The commander's holiday>shows its features clearly both in the using of language and the arrangement of the space—using daily language to describe the living condition of the common people. One artistic feature of this novel is that while laying stress on the describing of people's inner heart which is an inheriment of the Japanese novel, it adopted the style of the modern western literature—presenting the memory of past life in the describing the nowaday life,from which the father's miserable life was emphasized. Another feature of this novel is that it concentrates a lot on the family.It suggested the broken of the traditional Japanese family and the building of the new family as a result of the influence of the western democratic thought after the war. This paper tries to analyze the themes of the novel from three aspects—the analysis of the reconciliation of of the conflict between the father and the son, the image of the mother and the father's double identification. The protagonist of this novel represents the whole Japanese low-ranking officers, whose particularity lies in that they were the active participant of the war, but at the same time were the victim of the war. The author of this novel wants to enlight people to rethink about the war with the story of these people.Though it is evident that this novel did not critize the society directly, the auther's inspecting the society from daily life arouses people's attention on the people of low position in the society, which is the value of this novel.