The Construction Of War's Memory

As a minority woman writer,Ye Guangqin succeeds late in life in the Chinese contemporary literary world.Her distinguished and eminent noble family background provides abundant sources for the creation of her “family series” novels,which records the rise and fall of the Manchu nobles and witnesses the vicissitudes of Beijing.Thus,her novels have won unanimous praise from the novel and literary field.After she was assigned to Shaanxi province in 1968,she integrated herself into the lives of the local people and recorded the joys and sorrows of the life in northern Shaanxi.Moreover,she also composed a mournful song for the animals? lives through paying close attention to the destiny of wild animals in the remote mountains of Qinling.In the 1990 s,she went to Japan to research the Sino-Japanese war.With the displacement of space and the changes of history,she was able to survey the cultural differences between China and Japan rationally at a distance and reflected on the war.Under such circumstances,she composed war-theme novels.Ye Guangqin?s Japan-theme novels successfully portrayed a batch of characters with vivid personality and paid attention to some groups of the figures marginalized in the literary history which includes Japanese orphans,survivors of the explosion of atomic bombs,“comfort women”,Japanese women statesmen,Chinese traitors,etc.Based on this,Ye Guangqin also explored the existing cultural differences between China and Japan,reflected on the good and evil of human nature in the war,and then further traced back to the deep social culture extended from the psychological construction of Japanese “war sufferers” as an original “inflicter”.However,there are also some problems existing in her Japan-theme novels,such as lengthy expression and similarity and repetition of the novel material.Therefore,the academic circles pay more attention to her “family series” novels for a long time,with rare concern with her Japan-theme novels.On the basis of the former research findings,this thesis focuses on Ye Guangqin?s Japan-theme novels and aims to achieve an overall grasp of this writer and her theme novels.It presents the tough living conditions of the war orphans when they returned to Japan and had to face the enormous cultural differences between China and Japan.Then revolving around the members of the Japaneses Settlers,it reveals the “Manchuria complex” of Japanese and the tragedy of the Japanese Settlers when they became the victims of militarism.Finally,starting from Chinese and Japanese people?s different memories of the war,this thesis focuses on probing into the the memory construction of Japanese “war sufferers” as an original “inflicter”,and reveals the deep sociocultural origin of such an outlook on war,which constitutes the value and significance of this thesis.