was a Japanese poet, novelist and essayist. According to literary scholar Doug Slaymaker, Noma is widely credited with having discovered or invented the style of writing called by the term "postwar literature" (''sengo bungaku'') in Japan.

Early life and wartime service

Hiroshi Noma was born in

Kōbe Kobe ( , ; officially , ) is the capital city of Hyōgo Prefecture Japan. With a population around 1.5 million, Kobe is Japan's seventh-largest city and the third-largest port city after Tokyo and Yokohama. It is located in Kansai region, which ...

on February 23, 1915. His father worked as an electrician as well as a lay

Buddhist Buddhism ( , ), also known as Buddha Dharma and Dharmavinaya (), is an Indian religion or philosophical tradition based on teachings attributed to the Buddha. It originated in northern India as a -movement in the 5th century BCE, and ...

priest. Among his early literary influences were the poet Takeuchi Katsutarō and

French Symbolism Symbolism was a late 19th-century art movement of French and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts seeking to represent absolute truths symbolically through language and metaphorical images, mainly as a reaction against naturalism and realis ...

. He entered

Kyoto University , mottoeng = Freedom of academic culture , established = , type = National university, Public (National) , endowment = ¥ 316 billion (2.4 1000000000 (number), billion USD) , faculty = 3,480 (Teaching Staff) , administrative_staff ...

in 1935, where he graduated in French literature in 1938. While attending university, he became active in

Marxist Marxism is a Left-wing politics, left-wing to Far-left politics, far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a Materialism, materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand S ...

student and labour movements, and later turned his attention also to the situation of the

Burakumin is a name for a low-status social group in Japan. It is a term for ethnic Japanese people with occupations considered as being associated with , such as executioners, undertakers, slaughterhouse workers, butchers, or tanners. During Japan's ...

. He was drafted into the

Pacific War The Pacific War, sometimes called the Asia–Pacific War, was the theater of World War II that was fought in Asia, the Pacific Ocean, the Indian Ocean, and Oceania. It was geographically the largest theater of the war, including the vast ...

, stationed in the Philippines and northern China, and later spent time on charges of subversive thought in a military prison in

Ōsaka is a designated city in the Kansai region of Honshu in Japan. It is the capital of and most populous city in Osaka Prefecture, and the third most populous city in Japan, following Special wards of Tokyo and Yokohama. With a population of 2.7 ...

Literary career

In the immediate postwar period, Noma became a member of the

Japanese Communist Party The is a left-wing to far-left political party in Japan. With approximately 270,000 members belonging to 18,000 branches, it is one of the largest non-governing communist parties in the world. The party advocates the establishment of a democr ...

(JCP), which had achieved legal status under the U.S.-led

occupation of Japan Japan was occupied and administered by the victorious Allies of World War II from the 1945 surrender of the Empire of Japan at the end of the war until the Treaty of San Francisco took effect in 1952. The occupation, led by the United States wi ...

, and sought to produce literature that would support the cause of socialist revolution. He first received attention for his novel ''Dark Pictures'' (''Kurai e'', 1946), which was immediately hailed as a powerful work by an important new literary voice. ''Dark Pictures'' not only won praise from established literary critics, such as

Ken Hirano was the pen name of a prominent Japanese literary critic and longtime professor of literature at Meiji University. His real name was . Hirano was one of the seven founders of the journal ''Kindai Bungaku'' ("Modern Literature"), and played a st ...

, but also won the endorsement of the Communist Party thanks to its open embrace of Marxist ideology. Noma followed up ''Dark Pictures'' with other well-received works, including the short stories ''A Red Moon in Her Face'' (''Kao no naka no akai tsuki'', 1947) and ''Feeling of Disintegration'' (''Hōkai kankaku'', 1948), and the novel '' Zone of Emptiness'' (''Shinkū chitai'', 1952). ''A Red Moon in Her Face'' argued that "the war and defeat had made it impossible to form satisfying relationships to any other human being" (Van C. Gessel), while ''Zone of Emptiness'' was Noma's attempt to "provide the reader with a true picture of what my country was like when it was under the yoke of this dominating force f militarism (Noma). Thanks to the prominence of these works, Noma has been canonized as one of the " first generation" of postwar writers in Japan, alongside the likes of

Rinzō Shiina Rinzō Shiina (椎名麟三 ''Shiina Rinzō''; born 大坪昇 ''Noboru Ōtsuka''; 1 October 1911 – 28 March 1973) was a Japanese writer, novelist, short story writer and playwright. Shiina's best known works were written after 1950. His writ ...

Yutaka Haniya was a noted Japanese writer and critic. Biography Haniya was born in Taiwan, then a Japanese colony, to a samurai family named Hannya after the ''Hannya Shingyo'' ( Heart Sutra). He had a sickly childhood and suffered from tuberculosis in his ...

, Haruo Umezaki, and

Taijun Takeda was a Japanese novelist active as one of the first post-war generation writers, and a noted influencer on Chinese literature. His Dharma name was (恭蓮社謙誉上人泰淳和尚). Biography Takeda was the second son of a Buddhist priest of ...

. Noma's focus on the human body in these works led him to be categorized as a leading exponent of the "flesh school" (''Nikutai-ha'') of postwar writers. Over the course of the 1950s, and especially after the Communist Party's passive stance during the 1960 Anpo protests against the

U.S.-Japan Security Treaty The , more commonly known as the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty in English and as the or just in Japanese, is a treaty that permits the presence of U.S. military bases on Japanese soil, and commits the two nations to defend each other if one or th ...

, many writers and critics became disillusioned with the JCP. However, Noma remained committed to Marxist ideology at that time, and his 1961 novel ''Waga tō wa soko ni tatsu'' (lit. "My tower stands there") was criticized by literary critics such as Takeo Okuno, Kōichi Isoda, and

Takaaki Yoshimoto , also known as ''Ryūmei Yoshimoto'', was a Japanese poet, philosopher, and literary critic. As a philosopher, he is remembered as a founding figure in the emergence of the New Left in Japan, and as a critic, he was at the forefront of a moveme ...

for being too openly political. However that summer, Noma joined a group of writers and critics in issuing a blistering criticism of the Communist Party's cultural policies, and in December 1961, at the 10th Congress of the New Japanese Literature Association (''Shin Nihon Bungakkai''), Noma read aloud another statement criticizing the JCP's policies and calling for "a new relationship between politics and literature." These criticisms proved unacceptable to the party, and ultimately contributed to Noma's expulsion from the JCP in 1964. In 1971, Noma completed what is considered his masterpiece, ''Seinen no wa'' (lit. "Circle of youth"), which he had begun writing in 1948 and had taken him 24 years to complete. This lengthy 5-volume work, intended to embody Noma's "Total Novel Theory" (''zentai shosetsu riron''), was awarded the

Tanizaki Prize The Tanizaki Prize (谷崎潤一郎賞 ''Tanizaki Jun'ichirō Shō''), named in honor of the Japanese novelist Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, is one of Japan's most sought-after literary awards. It was established in 1965 by the publishing company Chūō K� ...

for 1971 as well as the

Lotus Prize for Literature The Lotus Prize for Literature (also known as Lotus International Reward for Literature or The Lotus Prize for African and Asian Literature) is a literary award presented annually to African and Asian authors by the Afro-Asian Writers' Associat ...

the following year. Among other later works, ''Shinran'' (1973) expounded Noma's thoughts on religion, and ''Sayama saiban'' (1976) considered discrimination against Burakumin as exemplified in the Sayama incident of 1963. Noma died of cancer in

Tokyo Tokyo (; ja, 東京, , ), officially the Tokyo Metropolis ( ja, 東京都, label=none, ), is the capital and largest city of Japan. Formerly known as Edo, its metropolitan area () is the most populous in the world, with an estimated 37.468 ...

in 1991.

Selected works

* 1946: ''Dark Pictures'' (''Kurai e'') * 1947: ''A Red Moon in Her Face'' (''Kao no naka no akai tsuki'') * 1948: ''Feeling of Disintegration'' (''Hōkai kankaku'') * 1952: ''Zone of Emptiness'' (''Shinkū chitai'') * 1961: ''Waga tō wa soko ni tatsu'' * 1971: ''Seinen no wa'' * 1973: ''Shinran'' * 1976: ''Sayama saiban''

Translations (selected)

* * *

Adaptations

''Zone of Emptiness'' was adapted into a film in 1952, directed by

Satsuo Yamamoto was a Japanese film director. Yamamoto was born in Kagoshima City. After leaving Waseda University, where he had become affiliated with left-wing groups, he joined the Shochiku film studios in 1933, where he worked as an assistant director to ...

References

Citations

Sources cited

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Noma, Hiroshi 1915 births 1991 deaths 20th-century Japanese writers People from Kobe Japanese Marxist writers Kyoto University alumni Japanese Marxists Japanese communists