Takami Jun
Takami Jun
(pen name of Yoshio Takama). Born Feb. 18, 1907, in Fukui Prefecture, on the island of Honshu; died Aug. 17, 1965, in Chiba. Japanese writer and critic.
Takami graduated from the English division of the University of Tokyo in 1930. In the 1930’s he participated briefly in the movement for a proletarian literature. He gained fame with the novel Old Friends Are Forgotten (1936), which portrayed former leftists who had renounced Marxism during the triumph of reaction. The novel Under Which Stars! (1940), written in the form of a free-and-easy conversation, depicted the mores of Tokyo’s red-light districts.
After World War II (1939–45), Takami became associated with the futurist poetry journal Nihon mirai ha and published the poetry collection Love for a Tree (1960). The novel Disgust (1960) portrayed an anarchist Japanese intellectual. Takami also wrote a number of studies on contemporary Japanese literature, including The Flowering and Decline of the Literature of the Showa Period (1958).
WORKS
Takami Jun bungaku zenshu, vols. 1–6. Tokyo, 1963.In Russian translation:
“Trus.” In laponskaia novella. Moscow, 1961.
REFERENCE
Istoriia sovremennoi iaponskoi literatury. Moscow, 1961. Pages 283–84. (Translated from Japanese.)K. REKHO