One The Tragic Factors Of Ayako Sono’s "Vacuous Family"

Written by Ayako Sono in 1973, the Vacuous Family was published by Yomiuri Shimbun in 1974, and then it became the best seller of the year. On one hand, the vacuous conjugal relationship and parenthood presented in the novel strike a responsive chord with readers; on the other hand, what is reflected in the work ——the limitation of Japan’s studying western civilization, the family tragedy caused by the rampancy of residual feudalism custom and the indifference deformed from human alienation with the highly developed of capitalism——is worth thinking.The Vacuous Family was published at the time when Japan was facing the first oil crisis and experiencing an unprecedented post-war depression. Before that, in the period of rapid economic development, Japanese people were generally cleansed by the U.S.-led democratic culture, but also haunted constantly by the residual feudal cultures and conventions. It was under this background of badly-hit economy and alternation of old ideas that,family, as a elementary cell of society, became increasingly prominent with the problem.By describing two family tragedies of Japanese upper-class, Ayako Sono expresses her resentment to Japanese feudal family system with the method of parallel structure. The family system, female subordination idea and good wife doctrine in Japanese family system are all reflected to varying degrees in the four adult protagonists from two families. Meanwhile, the family tragedy of collapse of conjugal relationship and parenthood built in the work exposes faithfully the violent collisions of old and new ideas in Japan, from which, we can have a restricted view to tenacity of the defects of residual feudal thought, the harm to human nature by its ramification, and the author’s complex due to the Catholic reference.The Vacuous Family is a work that makes people introspecting the anguish and painfulness of family system. It happens in the era of highly developed economy and stable and rich society, but it exposes the "deformity" and fragility behind the "ordinariness" of society, family as well as individual. The rich material life can’t assure the sustainability of family; however rich are the families; the uneasiness and crisis hidden in families and constrained in “social morality” cannot be avoided forever.This thesis is trying to analyze the novel from angles of both culture and sociology, by analyzing the surface depict and deep implication of factors like time, place and characters. Firstly, by analyzing the tragic characters, it elaborates the root-cause of the tragedy—Japanese traditional family system and the human alienation in highly developed capitalism. Secondly, it probes into the influence of the transition of family system by the collision between western democratic thoughts and Japanese feudal thought in the process of Japanese modernization. Finally, from the angles of female education and family education, it discusses the revelation from the transition of Japanese family system to Chinese social reform since its reform and opening-up.