Abstract:
This thesis draws on American scholarship on Juvenile Delinquent literature to propose and elaborate a new literary category of ochikobore seishun shōsetsu, thereby identifying a significant sub-genre of adolescent fiction in Japan, which has received scant attention from Japanese academia. It traces the evolution of this sub-genre from its origins in autobiography through the serialised mystery novels of writers such Ishida Ira and Kaneshiro Kazuki to more recent manifestations in the fantasy fiction of ranobe and ketai shōsetsu. Features of this evolution which are explored include: the rise and fall of didacticism and social critique as dominant tropes; the central role of the reader as vicarious participant in this subculture; the shifting generational attitudes towards a rebellious youth culture derived from 1950s America, first enacted in Japan in the 1970s, which became a trope of the popular cultural mainstream in the 1980s and 1990s and a dated throw-back in the 2000s. The thesis shows how, while the forms and modes of writing may change and diversify, the key elements of power relations, rebellion, the ‘good bad boy’ trope, didacticism and escapism remain and define the genre. Clear parameters for the identification and analysis of this subgenre are presented, which not only draw on the work of scholars of American adolescent literature, but develop this scholarship further, to move away from the rigid conventions of bounded categorisation towards the consideration of a gradient scale, using a range of tropic markers. This thesis opens up a new strand of critical discourse on the representation of Japanese rebellious youth culture, specifically in fiction, which complements and enhances the existing discourses which focus on manga, anime and film. It confronts head-on the confusion around the plethora of terms deployed to indicate various manifestations of rebellious youth culture in Japanese, and sets out a clear elucidation of the significance of each, exploring their significance in the separate spheres of the publishing markets and academia. It also confronts the dismissive attitudes in mainstream academia towards popular fiction, reclaiming the term shōtsetsu and all that it represents for this body of fiction. In its comparative approach, it maps the parallels and divergences in the developmental relationship between rebellious youth culture in the USA and in Japan, and shows how the influence of socio-cultural and market conditions on the development of ochikobore seishun shōsetsu in Japan has clear resonances with its American antecedents.