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Noma Hiroshi (1915-1991), one of Japan's most philosophical and experimental post-World War II novelists, was also an influential essayist, a poet, and a prominent revolutionary activist. His worldview was a unique synthesis of Buddhism, eroticism, and aestheticism with Marxism, which he regarded as the epitome of the scientific outlook and the most hopeful guide for social change. Even today, when the revolutionary component of Marxism has been largely discredited, Noma's work vibrates with intellectual excitement because of its radical vision of Japanese life and history, its artistic inventiveness, and its fusion of Eastern and Western thought. All these elements Noma incorporated into the theory and practice of what he called zentai shosetsu (the Total Novel).
During his lifetime, Noma's work received many awards and was translated widely. It was admired throughout the communist world, as well as in Western Europe. He is best known internationally for his 1952 novel Shinku Chitai, translated as Zone of Emptiness in 1956, about a desperate recruit to the Imperial Army who rebels against being bullied by fellow soldiers in sadistic wartime training. The novel was hailed as the first postwar work opposing militarism in Japan.
Sensitive to the nation's suffering and demoralization, Noma rejected the narrow focus on the delicate sensibilities of interpersonal relations typical of Japanese fiction, turning instead to Western literature and Marxism as alternatives to reactionary nationalism, nihilism, and the kind of pure aestheticism that ignored social problems. At the same time, he did not want to sacrifice artistic values, psychological honesty, and intellectual integrity to the impersonal ideology and simplistic propaganda of proletarian literature. Noma strove to create literary works that represented the physical, psychological, and social dimensions of life, all of which he insisted were integral to a scientific and holistic understanding of the world. His aim was to encourage the quest for self-realization in the nexus of social consciousness. How far he succeeded has been vigorously debated in Japan.
Noma's childhood was spent in Kobe, Yokohama, Okayama, and Nishinomiya, where his father, originally from a farm family, worked as an electrician. But the elder Noma's real vocation was that of founder and lay leader of an autonomous Buddhist congregation of more than 1.000 members. Though he wanted Hiroshi to succeed him, his harangues...