Apprenticeship Of The Novel: The <i>Bildungsroman</i> And The Invention Of History, Ca. 1770–1820

Boes, Tobias

doi:10.2307/complitstudies.45.3.0269

Cited by 2 publications

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“…The novel jumps back to Kunioka's humble beginnings, supplying oil and lubricant to fishing boats in the western Japanese port town of Shimonoseki, where he first earned the sobriquet “pirate” because of his use of boats to transfer and sell oil to fishers, undercutting the established supply and distribution lines on land. Too sprawling chronologically to count as a bildungsroman, A Man Called Pirate nonetheless echoes what the German literature scholar Tobias Boes (2008, 285) describes as the genre's “link between individual and collective emergence,” though it does so by placing the protagonist at the core of Japan's interwar and postwar ascendance. Kunioka's industry and ambition lead him to take the ambitious step of trying to gain a contract for wheel lubricant with the South Manchuria Railway.…”

Section: Fictional Pirates Contested Paternalistsmentioning

confidence: 95%

Precarity's Pirate: The Fictive Afterlives of Idemitsu Sazō

Leheny

2022

J of Asian Stud

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When the famously nationalistic Japanese author Hyakuta Naoki published his best-selling novel A Man Called Pirate (Kaizoku to yobareta otoko) in 2012, which subsequently became both a manga and a major film, he renewed interest in the midcentury oil baron Idemitsu Sazō, using him as the model for the novel's lead character. Hyakuta claims to have aimed to inspire the country, reeling from decades of slow growth as well as the 2011 tsunami and nuclear disaster, by featuring a visionary Japanese leader motivated primarily by love for his employees and his country. This article traces the efforts across these media to render Idemitsu as a credible character, particularly in dealing with his real-life family as well as his “family” of employees. It argues that the partial disappearance of the “real” Idemitsu in these versions of Hyakuta's novel allowed the production of a more believable one—made believable in part because of the essential Japanese values that he ostensibly represents, even as the constraints on these representations hint at fissures and tensions in contemporary political use of biographical fiction and film.

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Section: Fictional Pirates Contested Paternalistsmentioning

confidence: 95%