Golden Demon :: essays research papers

The Golden Demon (Response) Golden Demon (Konjiki-yasha) is the most important work of Koyo Ozaki, who was a pionner in modern Japanese literature. Since its publication in the form of a serial story in a daily newspaper, the novel has commanded high opinions, and many films and plays have been made of it. The â€Å"Golden Demon† synopsis is about a penniless drifter loses the woman he loves when her parents arrange her marriage to a rich playboy. Filled with bitterness and despair, the young man devotes his life to acquiring great wealth, which gradually turns him into a ruthless money lender. In brief, Omiya has a fiancà © whose name is Kwanichi. They love each other; however, she is loved by a capitalist, and her parents hope her to marriage Tomiyama. And Omiya also was dazzled by his wealth and married him. The story is talked Kwanichi’s grudge against her and Omiya’s regret about her marriage calmly, plus, it has been continued for six years. The poor girl, Omiya, couldn’t even die because of her regret feeling. She was still a old-fashioned girl who believed one’s fortune, and Kwanichi was simple-minded guy who become a leech because he was far beneath Mr. Tomiyama in wealth. However kwanichi was not really hero because he was deprived of his fiancà © and did not try to take her back. In Golden Demon, it lively depicts the live of people struggling and surviving powerfully despite being tossed about by the quickly changing waves of modern society. At the same time, the movie focuses on â€Å"love and money†, which we can safely say are universal themes for all human beings. The narrative is very â€Å"pre-modern† if â€Å"the modern† means the sense of self as unique, organic subjectivity. Since the narrative oscillates between that of and omniscient third person and emotional soliloquies by Kwanichi, Tomiyama, and especially Omiya, the reader can not see any trace of the boundary between the self and not-self. The narrator is, in this sense, nobody, who is floating in interstices of characters. This was not unusual at all before the modernist period, but it is interesting that object people’s voices restores the pre-modern type narrative in to the modern period. Does this mean that the social objects have no voice to be represented in modern narrative? Furthermore, in terms of its truth value in reality and self, for example, the value of realist narrative and confessional narrative, it was quite new and the first to openly mimic Zolaist naturalism.